fatal work. At any rate, he had had to flee the
country, escaping concealed in a peddler's cart, while close pressed
by the posse. He went South and was absent several years. After the
excitement of the murder and the struggle between the two factions had
died down, he returned and was not molested. And here he was in the
April twilight, on my path to Tongore, and the sight of him cheered my
heart.

I began my school Monday morning, April the 11th, 1854, and continued it
for six months, teaching the common branches to twenty or thirty pupils
from the ages of six to twelve or thirteen. I can distinctly recall
the faces of many of those boys and girls to this day--Jane North, a
slender, clean-cut girl of ten or eleven; Elizabeth McClelland, a fat,
freckled girl of twelve; Alice Twilliger, a thin, talkative girl with a
bulging forehead. Two or three of the boys became soldiers in the Civil
War, and fell in the battle of Gettysburg.

(In April, 1912, Mr. Burroughs received the following: "Hearty
congratulations upon your seventy-fifth birthday, from your old Tongore
pupil of many years ago. R--B--.")

I "boarded round," going home with the children as they invited me. I
was always put in the spare room, and usually treated to warm biscuit
and pie for supper. A few families were very poor, and there I was lucky
to get bread and potatoes. In one house I remember the bedstead was very
shaky, and in the middle of the night, as I turned over, it began to
sway and lurch, and presently all went down in a heap. But I clung to
the wreck till morning, and said nothing about it then.

I remember that a notable eclipse of the sun occurred that spring on the
26th of May, when the farmers were planting their corn.

What books I read that summer I cannot recall. Yes, I recall one--"The
Complete Letter-Writer," which I bought of a peddler, and upon which I
modeled many of my letters to various persons, among others to a Roxbury
girl for whom I had a mild fancy. My first letter to a girl I wrote
to her, and a ridiculously stiff, formal, and awkward letter it was, I
assure you. I am positive I addressed her as "Dear Madam," and started
off with some sentence from "The Complete Letter-Writer," so impressed
was I that there was a best way to do this thing, and that the book
pointed it out. Mary's reply was, "To my absent, but not forgotten
friend," and was simple and natural as girls' letters usually are. My
Grandfather Kelly died that