from peeling skin and fevered tissues.

My pupils were boys and girls of all sizes and qualities, and while it
would be too much to say that I made the best teacher of mathematics in
the county, I think I helped them in their reading, writing, and
spelling, which after all are more important than algebra. On Saturday I
usually went to town, for I had in some way become acquainted with the
principal of a little normal school which was being carried on in Morris
by a young Quaker from Philadelphia. Prof. Forsythe soon recognized in
me something more than the ordinary "elocutionist" and readily aided me
in securing a class in oratory among his students.

This work and Forsythe's comradeship helped me to bear the tedium of my
work in the country. No Saturday was too stormy, and the roads were
never too deep with snow to keep me from my weekly visit to Morris
where I came in contact with people nearer to my ways of thinking and
living.

But after all this was but the final section of my eastern
excursion--for as the spring winds set in, the call of "the sunset
regions" again overcame my love of cities. The rush to Dakota in March
was greater than ever before and a power stronger than my will drew me
back to the line of the middle border which had moved on into the
Missouri Valley, carrying my people with it. As the spring odors filled
my nostrils, my wish to emigrate was like that of the birds. "Out there
is my share of the government land--and, if I am to carry out my plan of
fitting myself for a professorship," I argued--"these claims are worth
securing. My rights to the public domain are as good as any other
man's."

My recollections of the James River Valley were all pleasant. My brother
and father both wrote urging me to come and secure a claim, and so at
last I replied, "I'll come as soon as my school is out," thus committing
all my future to the hazard of the homestead.

And so it came about that in the second spring after setting my face to
the east I planned a return to the Border. I had had my glimpse of
Boston, New York and Washington. I was twenty-three years of age, and
eager to revisit the plain whereon my father with the faith of a
pioneer, was again upturning the sod and building a fourth home. And
yet, Son of the Middle Border--I had discovered that I was also a
Grandson of New England.

CHAPTER XXV

The Land of the Straddle-Bug

A night in Chicago (where I saw Salvini play Othello), a day