politics and business, and when he was not roasting 'Bob' Ingersoll or
General Grant he was making fun of Illinois River millers. He said--and
you know what a big voice the little fellow has--he said this: 'There's
a town up by St. Anthony's Falls that will turn out more flour in a day
than we turn out in a week, and you know we are some pumpkins with our
flour barrels, ain't we?'"

"Say, kid, you're sure of what you just said?" asked the miller,
interestedly.

"Sure as I live," replied Jack; "why?"

"Well, I'm goin' up to see that bit of water near St. Paul."

"The nearest town is Minneapolis, a little suburb of St. Paul," answered
Jack, remembering his geography lessons.

Between oiling machinery, sacking bran, sewing flour sacks, heading
barrels, sweeping, and occasionally "learning his trade," as he called
it, over in the cooper shop, Jack got to be pretty well posted on the
manufacture of flour, but he did not like the business and finally gave
it up, deciding to take up the mercantile sphere and quit the field
wherein the foundations of the most gigantic fortunes were just ready
for the superstructure--flour, oil, harvest machinery and provisions, to
say nothing of the contributory railway and telegraph business. He went
to Boston, secured a position in a large wholesale establishment, lived
in one of the beautiful suburban cities which surround the "Hub" on
three sides, and there learned the lessons of prudence, sharp buying and
economical, labor-saving methods, which were in contrast with the
wastefulness and unsystematic methods prevalent in the great west. Not
long after Jack was well established his father packed up the family
belongings and moved where he could be with his son.

In a little country village fifty miles from Boston, on the Newburyport
branch of the B. & M. R. R., lived Hazel Hemmingway. When Jack Sheppard
was a pupil of Miss Freeman's in the old red school house back in the
hills of western Massachusetts, he divided his apple with Hazel, dragged
her white sled up hill in winter, and in summer made for her peachstone
baskets, which he whittled out with his "Barlow" knife. There was no
girl in all the world to Jack that compared with the brown-eyed,
brown-faced Hazel, and no boy in the school got so many cookies,
bon-bons and dainty notes slipped into arithmetic or grammar as did
Jack.

The parting when Jack's father moved to the west was full of tender
good-byes and promises to "write