"The Ploughboy 



of sleight-of-hand humbug. Some of these 

 spirits seem to be stout able-bodied fellows, 

 judging by the weights they lift and the heavy 

 furniture they bang about. But they do no 

 good work that I know of; never saw wood, 

 grind corn, cook, feed the hungry, or go to the 

 help of poor anxious mothers at the bedsides 

 of their sick children. I noticed when I was a 

 boy that it was not the strongest characters 

 who followed so-called mediums. When a 

 rapping-storm was at its height in Wisconsin, 

 one of our neighbors, an old Scotchman, re- 

 marked, "Thay puir silly medium-bodies may 

 gang to the deil wi' their rappin' speerits, for 

 they dae nae gude, and I think the deiPs their 

 fayther." 



Although in the spring of 1849 there was no 

 other settler within a radius of four miles of our 

 Fountain Lake farm, in three or four years 

 almost every quarter-section of government 

 land was taken up, mostly by enthusiastic home- 

 seekers from Great Britain, with only here and 

 there Yankee families from adjacent states, 

 [ 211 1 



