. The bartender and two or three other spectators had a quiet
chuckle at my expense. Before the week was out a letter came from the
Tongore trustees saying I could have the school; wages, ten dollars the
first month, and, if I proved satisfactory, eleven for the other five
months, and "board around."

I remember the handwriting of that letter as if I had received it but
yesterday. "Come at your earliest opportunity." How vividly I recall the
round hand in which those words were written! I replied that I would be
on hand the next week, ready to open school on Monday, the 11th.

Again I took the stage, my father driving me twelve miles to Dimmock's
Corners to meet it, a trip which he made with me many times in after
years. Mother always getting up and preparing our breakfast long before
daylight. We were always in a more or less anxious frame of mind upon
the road lest we be too late for the stage, but only once during the
many trips did we miss it. On that occasion it had passed a few minutes
before we arrived, but, knowing it stopped for breakfast at Griffin's
Corners, four or five miles beyond, I hastened on afoot, running most of
the way, and arrived in sight of it just as the driver had let off the
first crack from his whip to start his reluctant horses. My shouting was
quickly passed to him by the onlookers, he pulled up, and I won the race
quite out of breath.

On the present occasion we were in ample time, and my journey ended at
Shokan, from which place I walked the few miles to Tongore, in the
late April afternoon. The little frogs were piping, and I remember how
homesick the familiar spring sound made me. As I walked along the road
near sundown with this sound in my ears, I saw coming toward me a man
with a gait as familiar as was the piping of the frogs. He turned out
to be our neighbor Warren Scudder, and how delighted I was to see him in
that lonesome land! He had sold a yoke of oxen down there and had been
down to deliver them. The home ties pulled very strongly at sight of
him. Warren's three boys, Reub and Jack and Smith, were our nearest
boy neighbors. His father, old Deacon Scudder, was one of the notable
characters of the town. Warren himself had had some varied experiences.
He was one of the leaders in the anti-rent war of ten years before.
Indeed, he was chief of the band of "Indians" that shot Steel, the
sheriff, at Andes, and it was charged that the bullet from his pistol
was the one that did the