with a return of my courage I started
forth, confident of my ability to make a place for myself. With a wisdom
which I had not hitherto shown I first sought a home, and luckily, I say
luckily because I never could account for it, I knocked at the door of a
modest little boarding house, whose mistress, a small blonde lady,
invited me in and gave me a room without a moment's hesitation. Her
dinner--a delicious mid-day meal, so heartened me that before the end of
the day, I had secured a place as one of a crew of carpenters. My
spirits rose. I was secure.

My evenings were spent in reading Abbott's _Life of Napoleon_ which I
found buried in an immense pile of old magazines. I had never before
read a full history of the great Corsican, and this chronicle moved me
almost as profoundly as Hugo's _Les Miserables_ had done the year
before.

On Sundays I walked about the country under the splendid oaks and
beeches which covered the ridges, dreaming of the West, and of the
future which was very vague and not very cheerful in coloring. My plan
so far as I had a plan, was not ambitious. I had decided to return to
some small town in Illinois and secure employment as a teacher, but as I
lingered on at my carpenter trade till October nothing was left for me
but a country school, and when Orrin Carter, county superintendent of
Grundy County, (he is Judge Carter now) informed me that a district
school some miles out would pay fifty dollars a month for a teacher, I
gladly accepted the offer.

On the following afternoon I started forth a passenger with Hank Ring
on his way homeward in an empty corn wagon. The box had no seat,
therefore he and I both rode standing during a drive of six miles. The
wind was raw, and the ground, frozen hard as iron, made the ride a kind
of torture, but our supper of buckwheat pancakes and pork sausages at
Deacon Ring's was partial compensation. On the following Monday I
started my school.

The winter which followed appalled the oldest inhabitant. Snow fell
almost daily, and the winds were razor-bladed. In order to save every
dollar of my wages, I built my own fires in the school-house. This means
that on every week-day morning, I was obliged to push out into the
stinging dawn, walk a mile to the icy building, split kindling, start a
flame in the rude stove, and have the room comfortable at half-past
eight. The thermometer often went to a point twenty degrees below zero,
and my ears were never quite free