en sent from St. Paul to our rescue. To drive fifty or sixty miles
in a day to meet a lecture engagement was a frequent experience. I have
been driven across the prairies in June when they were like a mammoth
flower-bed, and in January when they seemed one huge snow-covered
grave--my grave, I thought, at times. Once during a thirty-mile drive,
when the thermometer was twenty degrees below zero, I suddenly
realized that my face was freezing. I opened my satchel, took out the
tissue-paper that protected my best gown, and put the paper over my face
as a veil, tucking it inside of my bonnet. When I reached my destination
the tissue was a perfect mask, frozen stiff, and I had to be lifted
from the sleigh. I was due on the lecture platform in half an hour, so I
drank a huge bowl of boiling ginger tea and appeared on time. That
night I went to bed expecting an attack of pneumonia as a result of the
exposure, but I awoke next morning in superb condition. I possess what
is called "an iron constitution," and in those days I needed it.

That same winter, in Kansas, I was chased by wolves, and though I had
been more or less intimately associated with wolves in my pioneer life
in the Michigan woods, I found the occasion extremely unpleasant. During
the long winters of my girlhood wolves had frequently slunk around
our log cabin, and at times in the lumber-camps we had even heard them
prowling on the roofs. But those were very different creatures from the
two huge, starving, tireless animals that hour after hour loped behind
the cutter in which I sat with another woman, who, throughout the whole
experience, never lost her head nor her control of our frantic horses.
They were mad with terror, for, try as they would, they could not outrun
the grim things that trailed us, seemingly not trying to gain on us, but
keeping always at the same distance, with a patience that was horrible.
From time to time I turned to look at them, and the picture they made as
they came on and on is one I shall never forget. They were so near that
I could see their eyes and slavering jaws, and they were as noiseless as
things in a dream. At last, little by little, they began to gain on us,
and they were almost within striking distance of the whip, which was our
only weapon, when we reached the welcome outskirts of a town and they
fell back.

Some of the memories of those days have to do with personal encounters,
brief but poignant. Once when I was giving a ser