been like older brothers; had restrained
their speech and manners out of care for me, and given me so much good
comradeship. Now they got on the westbound train one morning, in their
Sunday clothes, with their oilcloth valises--and I never saw them again.
Months afterward we got a card from Otto, saying that Jake had been down
with mountain fever, but now they were both working in the Yankee Girl
Mine, and were doing well. I wrote to them at that address, but my
letter was returned to me, 'Unclaimed.' After that we never heard from
them.

Black Hawk, the new world in which we had come to live, was a clean,
well-planted little prairie town, with white fences and good green
yards about the dwellings, wide, dusty streets, and shapely little trees
growing along the wooden sidewalks. In the centre of the town there
were two rows of new brick 'store' buildings, a brick schoolhouse, the
court-house, and four white churches. Our own house looked down over the
town, and from our upstairs windows we could see the winding line of
the river bluffs, two miles south of us. That river was to be my
compensation for the lost freedom of the farming country.

We came to Black Hawk in March, and by the end of April we felt like
town people. Grandfather was a deacon in the new Baptist Church,
grandmother was busy with church suppers and missionary societies, and I
was quite another boy, or thought I was. Suddenly put down among boys of
my own age, I found I had a great deal to learn. Before the spring term
of school was over, I could fight, play 'keeps,' tease the little girls,
and use forbidden words as well as any boy in my class. I was restrained
from utter savagery only by the fact that Mrs. Harling, our nearest
neighbour, kept an eye on me, and if my behaviour went beyond certain
bounds I was not permitted to come into her yard or to play with her
jolly children.

We saw more of our country neighbours now than when we lived on the
farm. Our house was a convenient stopping-place for them. We had a big
barn where the farmers could put up their teams, and their womenfolk
more often accompanied them, now that they could stay with us for
dinner, and rest and set their bonnets right before they went shopping.
The more our house was like a country hotel, the better I liked it.
I was glad, when I came home from school at noon, to see a farm-wagon
standing in the back yard, and I was always ready to run downtown to
get beefsteak or baker's