the horses to the wagon and, with, his trusty rifle for his only companion, drove away.  Bob, the faithful watch-dog, was very anxious to accompany him, and whined and howled for two or three days; but he was kept at home to defend the family.  A faithful protector was Bob, and woe to the intruder who dared to annoy the household while he was around.  Fernando waited patiently and long for the return of his father.  Every night before retiring to his trundle-bed, he would ask his mother if “father would come next day.”

At last the joyous shout of the older children announced the approach of the wagon.  They ran down the road to meet it.  The horses jogged along with the wagon, which rolled and jolted over the ground to the house.  The wagon was unloaded.  There were bags of meal and flour, coffee and tea, and then came the calico and cotton goods, jugs of molasses and a barrel of sugar.  The shoes were in a box and finally brought out.

A great disappointment was in store for Fernando.  His shoes were too small.  The father had lost the string and purchased the shoes “by guess.”  Fernando tried hard to squeeze his foot into the little green coverings; but they were so small and there was danger of bursting them.  Father had to go back to the land office in a day or two and would exchange them.  He rode off on the white mare, “old Betts,” and on his return had a pair of shoes large enough for Fernando.

They were awkward at first and cramped, pinched and galled his feet.  His mother made him a suit of clothes of “blue drilling” and next Sabbath the whole family got into the wagon and drove off eight miles to Bear Creek to “meeting.”

The people of the west were as thorough a combination and mixture of all nations, characters, languages, conditions and opinions as can well be imagined.  Scarcely a nation in Europe, or a State in the union, that did not furnish emigrants for the great west.  The greater mass from Europe were of the humble classes, who came from hunger, poverty and oppression.  They found themselves here with the joy of shipwrecked mariners cast on the untenanted woods, and instantly became cheered with the hope of being able to build up a family and a fortune from new elements.

The Puritan and the planter, the German, the Briton, the Frenchman, the Irishman and the Swede, each with his peculiar prejudices and local attachments, and all the complicated and interwoven tissue of sentiments, feelings and thoughts, that country, kindred and home, indelibly combined with the web of youthful existence, settled down beside each other.  The merchant, mechanic and farmer found themselves placed by necessity in the same society.  Men must cleave to their kind and must be dependent upon each other.  Pride and jealousy give way to the natural yearnings of the human heart for society.  They began to rub off mutual prejudices.  One took a step and then the other.  They met half way and embraced; and the society thus newly organized and constituted was more liberal, enlarged, unprejudiced, and of course more affectionate and pleasant than a society of people of like birth and character, who would bring all their early prejudices as a common stock, to be transmitted as an inheritance to posterity.