te was quite
effective.

The other occurrence was the visit to Watertown of Herr Dreisbach with
his famous menagerie. Our indulgent father took my brother and myself
and a neighbor's daughter to see the "great instructive exhibition." It
took our ox-team three hours to make the seven miles, and the elephant's
footprints by the bridges, and other impedimenta of the great show,
which we passed, carried our excitement, which had been cruelly growing
for three weeks, well-nigh up to an exploding climax. I was told not to
lose my ticket, or I could not get in; and when the ticket taker seized
hold of it, I held on until he finally yelled angrily, "Let go, you
little cuss!" whereupon my father came to his rescue. The show on the
whole was very satisfactory, except for the color of Columbus, the fine
old elephant, which for some reason, probably from the show bills on the
barns, I had expected to be of a greenish tint. I also had supposed that
the lion would drag his chariot at least half a mile, with the driver in
heroic pose, instead of merely two cars' length. Herr Dreisbach
afterwards showed on Rock Prairie, in the open country, a few miles east
of Janesville. People came from great distances to attend, even from as
far as Baraboo, sometimes camping out two nights each way.

Our first public edifice was a log schoolhouse about twenty feet square.
It was on the opposite side of the river, nearly a mile distant, but I
began to attend school before I was fully five years old. One of the
things I remember of one of my early teachers most distinctly is, that
she used to hang a five-franc piece, tied with blue ribbon, around the
neck of the scholar who had "left off at the head." I was occasionally
favored, but my mother's satisfaction was greatly modified by her fear
that I would lose the coin while taking it back the next day.

The teachers probably could not have passed a normal school examination,
but they could do what our graduates now cannot do--that is, make and
mend a quill pen. Those were all the pens we had, and many a time have I
chased our geese to get a new quill. The teachers patiently guided our
wobbling ideas from the alphabet to cube root. The lessons over, we were
told to "toe the crack," and "make obeisance," and were then put through
our paces in the field of general knowledge. I still remember, from
their drilling, the country, territory, county, and town in which we
lived; that James K. Polk was presiden