was his contribution to my
education and I am grateful to him for it. In after life I had the
pleasure of telling him how much he had suggested to me in that sermon.

There was much to allure a farmer boy in the decorum of well-dressed men
and the grace of daintily clad women as well as in the music and the dim
interior of the church (which seemed to me of great dignity and charm)
and I usually went both morning and evening to watch the regal daughters
of the county aristocracy go up the aisle. I even joined a Sunday school
class because charming Miss Culver was the teacher. Outwardly a stocky,
ungraceful youth, I was inwardly a bold squire of romance, needing only
a steed and a shield to fight for my lady love. No one could be more
essentially romantic than I was at this time--but fortunately no one
knew it!

Mingling as I did with young people who had been students at the
Seminary, I naturally developed a new ambition. I decided to enter for
the autumn term, and to that end gained from my father a leave of
absence during August and hired myself out to bind grain in the harvest
field. I demanded full wages and when one blazing hot day I rode on a
shining new Marsh harvester into a field of wheat just south of the Fair
Ground, I felt myself a man, and entering upon a course which put me
nearer the clothing and the education I desired.

Binding on a harvester was desperately hard work for a sixteen-year-old
boy for it called for endurance of heat and hunger as well as for
unusual celerity and precision of action. But as I considered myself
full-grown physically, I could not allow myself a word of complaint. I
kept my place beside my partner hour after hour, taking care of my half
of ten acres of grain each day. My fingers, raw and bleeding with the
briars and smarting with the rust on the grain, were a torture but I
persisted to the end of harvest. In this way I earned enough money to
buy myself a Sunday suit, some new boots and the necessary books for the
seminary term which began in September.

Up to this time I had never owned an overcoat nor a suit that fitted me.
My shirts had always been made by my mother and had no real cuffs. I now
purchased two boxes of paper cuffs and a real necktie. My intense
satisfaction in these garments made mother smile with pleasure and
understanding humor.

In spite of my store suit and my high-heeled calf-skin boots I felt very
humble as I left our lowly roof that first day and st