I think that that passage in the Scriptures which tells us to visit those who are in prison as well as the sick, is a thing that shows the Bible to be an inspired work; but, this belief has come to me through my remembrance of my sufferings when I was arrested.  Not that I went to prison.  In fact, I do not believe there was anything like a jail nearer than Iowa City or Dubuque; but Jim told me that he understood that I was a terrible ruffian and would have to be looked after very closely.  He made me help him about the blacksmith shop, and I learned so much about blacksmithing that I finally set up a nice little forge on the farm and did a good deal of my own work.  At last Jim said I was stealing his trade, and when Virginia Royall came down to the post-office the day the mail came in, which was a Friday in those days, and came to the shop to see me, he told her what a fearful criminal I was.  She laughed and told Jim to stop his fooling, not knowing what a very serious thing it was for me.

When she asked me to come up to see the Elder and Grandma Thorndyke, and I told her I was a prisoner, Jim paroled me to her, and made her give him a receipt for me which he wrote out on the anvil on the leaf of his pass-book, and had her sign it.  He said he was glad to get rid of me for two reasons:  one was that I was stealing his trade, and the other that I was likely to bu’st forth at any time and kill some one, especially a claim-jumper if there were any left in the county, which he doubted.

So I went with Virginia and spent the night at the elder’s.  Grandma Thorndyke took my part, though she made a great many inquiries about Rowena Fewkes; but the elder warned me solemnly against lawlessness, though when we were alone together he made me tell him all about the affair, and seemed to enjoy the more violent parts of it as if it had been a novel; but when he asked me who were in the “mob” I refused to tell him, and he said maybe I was right—­that my honor might be involved.  Grandma Thorndyke seemed to have entirely got over her fear of having me and Virginia together, and let us talk alone as much as we pleased.

I told them about the quantity of wild strawberries I had out in Vandemark’s Folly, and when Virginia asked the sheriff if the elder and his wife and herself might go out there with me for a strawberry-and-cream feast, he said his duty made it incumbent upon him to insist that he and his wife go along, and that they would furnish the sugar if I would pony up the cream—­of which I had a plenty.  So we had quite a banquet out on the farm.  Once in a while I would forget about the assaults and the treason and be quite jolly—­and then it would all come back upon me, and I would break out in a cold sweat.  Out of this grew the first strawberry and cream festival ever held in any church in Monterey Centre, the fruit being furnished, according to the next issue of the Journal “by the malefactors confined in the county Bastille”—­in other words by me.