agon
occasionally to Grafton, and Jerseyville, and even once to Alton,
twenty miles away, but the greater part of the time was spent at the
farm, and around the old home, and in the society of the family. I
reckon I rambled over every acre of the farm, and besides, took long
walks in the woods of the adjacent country, for miles around. The big,
gushing Sansom Spring, about half a mile from home, was a spot
associated with many happy recollections. I would go there, lie flat on
the ground, and take a copious drink of the pure, delicious water, then
stroll through the woods down Sansom branch to its confluence with
Otter creek, thence down the creek to the Twin Springs that burst out
at the base of a ridge on our farm, just a few feet below a big sugar
maple, from here on to the ruins of the old grist mill my father
operated in the latter '40s, and then still farther down the creek to
the ancient grist mill (then still standing) of the old pioneer, Hiram
White. Here I would cross to the south bank of the creek and make my
way home up through Limestone, or the Sugar Hollow. From my earliest
youth I always loved to ramble in the woods, and somehow these around
the old home now looked dearer and more beautiful to me than they ever
had before.

The last time I ever saw my boyhood home was in August, 1894. It had
passed into the hands of strangers, and didn't look natural. And all
the old-time natural conditions in that locality were greatly changed.
The flow of water from Sansom Spring was much smaller than what it had
been in the old days, and only a few rods below the spring it sunk into
the ground and disappeared. The big, shady pools along Sansom branch
where I had gone swimming when a boy, and from which I had caught many
a string of perch and silversides, were now dry, rocky holes in the
ground, and the branch in general was dry as a bone. And Otter Creek,
which at different places where it ran through our farm had once
contained long reaches of water six feet deep and over, had now shrunk
to a sickly rivulet that one could step across almost anywhere in that
vicinity. And the grand primeval forest which up to about the close of
the war, at least, had practically covered the country for many miles
in the vicinity of my old home, had now all been cut down and
destroyed, and the naked surface of the earth was baking in the rays of
the sun. It is my opinion, and is stated for whatever it may be worth,
that the wholesale d