7IN DAKOTA, 15 
“Thank you, and [ hope always to deserve them.” 
This conversation took place one clear, cold morn- 
ing in January, 1879, in front of my house—or rather 
the house I was living in, for I was only a tenant—on 
a large farm in Central [llmois. 
A FEW WORDS PERSONAL. 
I'm Tom—Thomas Taylor, when written in full. ° 
The man I was talking with was Jason Moore, « ten- 
ant on anadjoining farm. I had been brought up in 
that neighborbood, and had worked all my life on a 
farm. I had, during my boyhood, gone to the district 
school three or four months in the winter, and had 
tried to make the most of these rather meager educa- 
tional advantages. I wrote a fair hand, and was 
pretty well up in geography, grammar and arithmetic. 
My last winter at school I tackled algebra, and, hav- 
ing considerable taste for mathematics, managed to get 
about half-way through Davies’ First Lessons without 
the help of a teacher, as our teacher that winter— 
though one of the best I ever had—never had studied 
algebra at all, and so could give me no assistance im 
it. My success in algebra came near changing the 
whole current of my life, for it set me seriously think- 
ing of trying to get a term or two in the Greenfield 
Academy, and from thence into the study of the law. 
But the spring work came on and soon drove these 
professional notions out of my head. 
Perhaps it is as well. Yet there often comes to me 
a great longing for the mental training a college 
