he road
because it was built before the road was there--we had arrived before
the surveyor--I learned to speak, read, and love the English language.
My first teacher was a Cambro-American who could by her bi-lingual
accomplishment ease the way of the little Welsh immigrant children into
English. I think I can remember crying when the teacher would speak to
me in the then unintelligible English.

In 1856, my thirteenth year, the family began to realize that they had
chosen a hard place in which to make a home. The battle would have been
a grim one, with the tall trees and their stumps, the "hardhead"
boulders, the marshes, the mosquitoes, and the semi-annual attack of
ague, had it not been lightened with the blind hopes and the
inspirations that bring to frontier lives the consolations and
encouragements of the pioneer. So the home in Ixonia, that had welcomed
the coming of the first plank-road and witnessed the approach of the La
Crosse & Milwaukee Railroad as far as Oconomowoc, was sold, and in 1855
we moved to a farm of 400 acres in Sauk County.

The next year this was reached by the old Milwaukee & Mississippi
Railroad and the village of Spring Green was established, adjoining the
farm. Here I worked on the farm in the summer time, and during the
winter time grew with the growing village school in Spring Green. During
the spring term of school, in 1861, the boys were organized into the
Spring Green Guards. "Billy" Hamilton, a clerk in George Pound's store,
was excused by his employer during the noon hour and the recesses, to
come over to drill us. The tresses, black or golden, were sacrificed.
Our hair was "shingled" and we wore cadet caps. Of course the boys had
been stirred when they heard of the humiliation preceding the
inauguration of Lincoln, of the firing on Sumter; and in the autumn all
of the Spring Green Guards who were ripe enough heard and heeded the
call of Father Abraham. Captain "Billy" Hamilton went out as sergeant in
the 6th Wisconsin Battery, and four years later came back as colonel at
the head of the 36th Wisconsin Volunteer Infantry.

I was too young to go out in 1861. I cannot say that I panted for the
fray. I dreaded the coming of the dire moment when conscience, not the
government, would deliver me into a service that had no charm for me.
Another winter's schooling in the Spring Green Academy, another sowing
and harvest time, then leaving unstacked the hay that I had mown, and in
the shocks