finished the harvest on the rented farm and moved to the house on the
knoll. It was lonely work for a boy of eleven but there were frequent
breaks in the monotony and I did not greatly suffer. I disliked
cross-cutting for the reason that the unrotted sods would often pile up
in front of the coulter and make me a great deal of trouble. There is a
certain pathos in the sight of that small boy tugging and kicking at the
stubborn turf in the effort to free his plow. Such misfortunes loom
large in a lad's horizon.

One of the interludes, and a lovely one, was given over to gathering the
hay from one of the wild meadows to the north of us. Another was the
threshing from the shock on the rented farm. This was the first time we
had seen this done and it interested us keenly. A great many teams were
necessary and the crew of men was correspondingly large. Uncle David was
again the thresher with a fine new separator, and I would have enjoyed
the season with almost perfect contentment had it not been for the fact
that I was detailed to hold sacks for Daddy Fairbanks who was the
measurer.

Our first winter had been without much wind but our second taught us the
meaning of the word "blizzard" which we had just begun to hear about.
The winds of Wisconsin were "gentle zephyrs" compared to the blasts
which now swept down over the plain to hammer upon our desolate little
cabin and pile the drifts around our sheds and granaries, and even my
pioneer father was forced to admit that the hills of Green's Coulee had
their uses after all.

One such storm which leaped upon us at the close of a warm and beautiful
day in February lasted for two days and three nights, making life on the
open prairie impossible even to the strongest man. The thermometer fell
to thirty degrees below zero and the snow-laden air moving at a rate of
eighty miles an hour pressed upon the walls of our house with giant
power. The sky of noon was darkened, so that we moved in a pallid
half-light, and the windows thick with frost shut us in as if with gray
shrouds.

Hour after hour those winds and snows in furious battle, howled and
roared and whistled around our frail shelter, slashing at the windows
and piping on the chimney, till it seemed as if the Lord Sun had been
wholly blotted out and that the world would never again be warm. Twice
each day my father made a desperate sally toward the stable to feed the
imprisoned cows and horses or to replenish our fuel--for th