My Boyhood and Youth 



were forgotten in the fun we had lassoing a 

 stubborn old sow and laboriously trying to 

 teach her to go reasonably steady in rope har- 

 ness. 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, their merry sham 

 fights, and the false alarms they got up for the 

 fun of scampering back to their mother and 

 begging her in most persuasive little squeals to 

 lie down and give them a drink. 



After her darling short-snouted babies were 

 about a month old,l 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 fol- 

 lowed the right bank of the Fox River between 

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