EARLY MANHOOD IN THE MIDDLE WEST 141 



but when stewed they made an appetizing dish and 

 perhaps tasted better for having come from a tree 

 that had been thrice sanctified. 



By the time we got fully settled in the re- 

 modelled house we were a thousand dollars in debt. 

 Not having much corn to husk that first year 

 having raised oats largely I engaged to build a 

 small house for a neighbor and during the winter 

 I taught my last public school. All this was an 

 effort to get out of sight of the poorhouse, for in 

 my young days I had visited a county almshouse 

 nearly as bad as the one described in Eggleston's 

 Hoosier Schoolmaster and it had made a profound 

 impression on my mind. Up to that time I had had 

 no very definite plan of life but for a while after- 

 ward my chief effort was to make tracks away 

 from that horror of my boyhood; and the diffi- 

 culties I encountered compelled me to think to a 

 purpose and to make farther-reaching plans. 



Without attempting to set down exactly the 

 dates of the incidents of the six or seven years I 

 spent here, I may relate some of the more import- 

 ant of them. Not long after I moved out to this 

 farm, Mr. O. H. P. Buchanan induced me to take 

 150 of his fine-wool ewes on shares I to feed 

 and care for them and to deliver to him one-half 

 of the washed wool and one-half of the lambs. I 



