fears. But father failed to see the fun and was very angry at David, heaved the bur-oak outside, and passionately demanded his reason for fetching“sic a muckle rail like that instead o' a switch? Do ye ca' that a switch? I have a gude mind to thrash you instead o' John."

David, with demure downcast eyes, looked preternaturally righteous, but as usual prudently answered never a word.

It was a hard job in those days to bring up Scotch boys in the way they should go; and poor overworked father was determined to do it if enough of the right kind of switches could be found. But this time, as the sun was getting high, he hitched up Tom and Jerry and made haste to the Kingston lumber-yard, leaving me unscathed and as innocently wicked as ever; for hardly had father got fairly out of sight among the oaks and hickories, ere all our troubles, hell-threatenings, and exhortations were forgotten in the fun we had lassoing a stubborn old sow and laboriously trying to teach her to go reasonably steady in rope harness. She was the first hog that father bought to stock the farm, and we boys regarded her as a very wonderful beast. In a few weeks she had a lot of pigs, and of all the queer, funny animal children we had yet seen, none amused us more. They were so comic in size and shape, in their gait and gestures and merry sham fights, and in the false alarms they got up for the fun of scampering back to their mother.

After her darling short-snouted babies were about a month old, she took them out to the woods and gradually roamed farther and farther from the shanty in search of acorns and roots. One afternoon we heard a

rifle-shot, a very noticeable thing, as we had no near neighbors as yet. We thought it must have been fired by an Indian, on the trail that followed the right bank of the Fox River between Portage and Packwaukee Lake and passed our shanty at a distance of about three quarters of a mile. Just a few minutes after that shot was heard, along came the poor mother, rushing up to the shanty for protection, with her pigs, all out of breath and terror-stricken. One of them was missing and we supposed, of course, that an Indian had shot it for food. Next day, I discovered a blood-puddle where the Indian trail crossed the outlet of our lake. One of father's hired men told us that the Indians thought nothing of levying this sort of blackmail whenever they were hungry. The solemn awe and fear in the eyes of that old mother and little pigs I never can forget; it was as unmistakable and deadly a fear as I ever saw expressed by any human eye, and corroborates in no uncertain way the oneness of all of us.

Coming direct from school in Scotland, while we were still hopefully ignorant and far from tame, notwithstanding the unnatural profusion of teaching and thrashing lavished upon us, getting acquainted with the animals. about us was a never-failing source of wonder and delight. At first my father, like nearly all the backwoods settlers, bought a yoke of oxen to do the farm work; and as field after field was cleared, the number was gradually increased until we had five yoke. These wise, patient, plodding animals did all the ploughing, logging, hauling, and hard work of every sort for the first four or five years; and never having seen oxen before, we looked at them with the same eager freshness

of conception as at the wild animals. We worked with them, sympathized with them in their rest and toil and play, and thus learned to know them far better than we should have done had we been only trained scientific naturalists.

We soon learned that each ox and cow and calf had its own individual character. Old white-faced Buck, one of the second yoke of oxen that we owned, was a notably sagacious fellow. He seemed to reason sometimes almost like ourselves. In the fall we fed the cattle lots of pumpkins, and had to split them open so that mouthfuls could be readily broken off. But Buck never waited for us to come to his help. The others, when they were hungry and impatient, tried to break through the hard rind with their teeth, but seldom with success, if the pumpkin was full-grown. Buck never wasted time in this mumbling, slavering way, but crushed them with his head. He went to the pile, picked out a good one, like a boy choosing an orange or apple, rolled it down on to the open ground, deliberately knelt in front of it, placed his broad flat brow on top of it, brought his weight hard down and crushed it, then quietly arose and went on with his meal in comfort. Some would call this "instinct," as if so-called “blind instinct" must necessarily make an ox stand on its head to break pumpkins when its teeth got sore, or when nobody came with an axe to split them. Another fine ox showed his skill when hungry by opening all the fences that stood in his way to the corn-fields.

When we went to Portage, our nearest town, about ten or twelve miles from the farm, it would oftentimes be late before we got back; and in the summer-time, in

sultry, rainy weather, the clouds were full of sheetlightning, which every minute or two would suddenly illumine the landscape, revealing all its features, the hills and valleys, meadows and trees, about as fully and clearly as the noonday sunshine; then as suddenly the glorious light would be quenched, making the darkness seem denser than before. On such nights the cattle had to find the way home without any help from us, but they never got off the track, for they followed it by scent, like dogs. Once father, returning late from Portage or Kingston, compelled Tom and Jerry, our first oxen, to leave the dim track, imagining they must be going wrong. At last they stopped and refused to go farther. Then father unhitched them from the wagon, took hold of Tom's tail, and was thus led straight to the shanty. Next morning he set out to seek his wagon, and found it on the brow of a steep hill above an impassable swamp.

As I was the eldest boy, I had the care of our first span of work-horses. Their names were Nob and Nell. Nob was very intelligent, and even affectionate, and could learn almost anything. Nell was entirely different, balky and stubborn, though we managed to teach her a good many circus tricks; but she never seemed to like to play with us in anything like an affectionate way as Nob did. We turned them out one day into the pasture, and an Indian, hiding in the brush that had sprung up after the grass-fires had been put out, managed to catch Nob, tied a rope to her jaw for a bridle, rode her to Green Bay, seventy-five or a hundred miles away, and tried to sell her for fifteen dollars. All our hearts were sore, as if one of the family had been lost. We hunted everywhere, and could not at first imagine what had

become of her. We discovered her track where the fence was broken down, and following it for a few miles, made sure the track was Nob's; and a neighbor told us he had seen an Indian riding fast through the woods on a horse that looked like Nob. But we could find no further trace of her, until a month or two after she was lost and we had given up hope of ever seeing her again. Then we learned that she had been taken from an Indian by a farmer at Green Bay, because he saw that she had been shod and had worked in harness. So when the Indian tried to sell her the farmer said, "You are a thief. That is a white man's horse. You stole her."

"No," said the Indian, “I brought her from Prairie du Chien, and she has always been mine."

The man, pointing to her feet and the marks of the harness, said, “You are lying. I will take that horse away from you and put her in my pasture, and if you come near it I will set the dogs on you."

Then he advertised her. One of our neighbors happened to see the advertisement and brought us the glad news, and great was our rejoicing when father brought her home. That Indian must have treated her with terrible cruelty, for when I was riding her through the pasture several years afterward, looking for another horse that we wanted to catch, as we approached the place where she had been captured, she stood stock-still, gazing through the bushes, fearing the Indian might still be hiding there ready to spring; and so excited that she trembled, and her heart-beats were so loud that I could hear them distinctly when I was sitting on her back, boomp, boomp, boomp, like the drumming of a partridge. So vividly had she remembered her terrible experiences.