to
thinking so much of the boys that he wanted to legally adopt them, and
then we find their father taking alarm and bringing them back to the
parsonage, which was then at Elyria, Ohio.

The boys worked at odd jobs, on farms in Summer, clerking in country
stores, driving stage--and be it said to the credit of their father, he
allowed them to keep the money they made. Education comes through doing
things, making things, going without things, taking care of yourself,
talking about things, and when Robert was seventeen he had education
enough to teach a "Deestrick School" in Illinois.

To teach is a good way to get an education. If you want to know all
about a subject, write a book on it, a wise man has said. If you wish to
know all about things, start in and teach them to others.

Bob was eighteen--big and strong, with a good nature and an enthusiasm
that had no limit. There were spelling-bees in his school, and a
debating-society, that had impromptu rehearsals every night at the
grocery. Country people are prone to "argufying"--the greater and more
weighty the question, the more ready are the bucolic Solons to engage
with it. And it is all education to the youth who listens and takes
part--who has the receptive mind.

This love of argument and contention among country people finds vent in
lawsuits. Pigs break into a man's garden and root up the potatoes, and
straightway the owner of the potatoes "has the law" on the owner of the
pigs. This strife is urged on by kind neighbors who take sides, and by
the "setters" at the store, who fire the litigants on to unseemliness.
Local attorneys are engaged and the trial takes place at the
railroad-station, or in the schoolhouse on Saturday. Everybody has
opinions, and overrules the "jedge" next day, or not, as the case may
be.

This petty strife may seem absurd to us, but it is all a part of the
Spirit of the Hive, as Maeterlinck would say. It is better than
dead-level dumbness--better than the subjection of the peasantry of
Europe. These pioneers settle their own disputes. It makes them think,
and a few at least are getting an education. This is the cradle in which
statesmen are rocked.

And so it happened that no one was surprised when, in the year Eighteen
Hundred Fifty-three, there was a sign tacked up over a grocery in
Shawneetown, Illinois, and the sign read thus: "R. G. & E. C. Ingersoll,
Attorneys and Counselors at Law."

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