see Needham paddling by, swift and silent.  It always gave me the shudders and sent me to the house.  One day, on coming home from school, I saw a great platter of red meat on the table.  I asked who had killed the beef; it was a practice to share the meat with the neighbors, whenever a large animal was killed, taking pay in kind.  I was told it was not beef, and being unable to guess was at last informed that it was bear meat, which Mr. Needham had left.  As he had killed the animal near where I hunted the cows every night, the news gave me a sensation.

Uncle Ben Piper, the only gray-haired man in the community, kept tavern and was an oracle on nearly all subjects.  He was also postmaster, and a wash-stand drawer served as post office.  It cost twenty-five cents in those times to pass a letter between Wisconsin and the East.  Postage did not have to be prepaid, and I have known my father to go several days before he could raise the requisite cash to redeem a letter which he had heard awaited him in the wash-stand drawer, for Uncle Ben was not allowed to accept farm produce or even bank script for postage.

An Englishman named Pease, who lived near us, had “wheels.”  He thought the Free Masons and the women were in league to end his life.  Every night he ranged his gun and farm tools beside his bed, to help ward off the attack that he constantly expected.  Nothing could induce him to eat any food that a woman had prepared.  In changing “work” with my father, which often occurred, he would bring his own luncheon and eat it by the fire during mealtime.  But after my sister was born, he refused to enter the house; he told the neighbors that “women were getting too thick up at Coe’s.”  Pease had nicknames for all the settlers but one, and while very polite to their faces, he always applied his nicknames in their absence.

A man named Rugg lost caste with his neighbors because he dug and used a potato pit in an Indian mound from which he had thrown out a large number of human bones.  Some of the bones were of gigantic size.

There were many good hunters among the settlers; the Smith brothers scorned to shoot a bird or squirrel except through the head.  If there were sickness in the family of any neighbor, the Smiths saw that partridges, quail, or pigeons, properly shot, were supplied.  Another Smith was a bee hunter, and a very successful one, too.  Those were the days when the beautiful passenger pigeons at times seemed to fill the woods and the sky.  Deer were very abundant; I have seen them eating hay with my father’s cows; and in the spring and fall seasons the river was covered with wild ducks and geese.

Two events in my seventh year left a strong impression upon me.  The first was an address by a colored man named Lewis Washington, a runaway slave, who had a natural gift of oratory and made many speeches in this state.  I was so curious to see a genuine black man that I got too close to him when he was in the convulsion of putting on his overcoat, and caught a considerable thump.  No harm was done, but he apologized very earnestly.  I have read that his campaigning of the state was quite effective.