It was a warm beautiful day, and the examiner sat on one end of
the log and I on the other. Then the questioning commenced. Why he
even asked what reading was, and although I had been reading for ten
years I could hardly tell. He asked me how far it was from Dan to
BeerSheba, and then laughed at me because I did not know. He asked
me if I had never heard the phrase "from Dan to BeerSheba." I told
him it seemed to me that I did once hear an old preacher say
something about a young man named Dan who was handsome and strong,
but he got into a pretty dangerous place one time among some lions,
but he came out all right, the preacher said, because he would never
drink beer or wine or whiskey or anything that would make a man
drunk. I do not think the examiner ever heard that story before, so
he quit asking such irrelevant questions and got to business, asking
about vowels and consonants, and accent and emphasis, curves and
loops, Tories and Whigs, order and discipline, etc. etc. until he
said that will do, and wrote me out a certificate to teach. That
county examiner was my oldest brother, hence the fun. From then on,
I was a public school teacher for about 15 years. I stood the test
many times in Indiana, Missouri and Kansas, to secure a teacher's
certificate, but never failed to get the first grade. Of course, I,
in the meantime, spent about three more years at school. My
popularity as a successful teacher came at once, even at the first
term, so much so that they sent for me to come and teach for them in
a place called Tophet. Boys, if you do not know what that means look
it up in the dictionary. The place was so bad, that teachers for
several years had not been able to teach to the end of the term. The
bad boys and girls would run the teacher off. I knew all this. And
instead of going with a rod, as other teachers had I went with love
and firmness determined to win right in the start the respect and
confidence of the big boys and girls. I succeeded.

The first death to occur in my father's family was the death of my
father himself. In the early fall of 1854 father's health began to
fail. The disease was dropsy. Dr. Sam Elmore, the resident
physician of Clarksburg did all he could, faithfully attending father
all the fall and winter up to the day of his death. But about one
week before death, the doctor requested that we send for Dr.
McDonald, who lived in Newberry, a town about eight miles away. Thi