Whether he was then kind or cross to me or to my mother I can not remember.  Probably my mind was too young to notice any difference less than that between love and cruelty.  I know I was happy; and it seems to me that the chief reason of my joy was the new cap and the fact that my heart swelled and I was proud of myself.  I do not believe that I was more than three years old.  All this may be partly a dream; but I think not.

John Rucker was no dream.  He was my mother’s second husband; and by the time I was five years old, and had begun to go to one little school after another as we moved about, John Rucker had become the dark cloud in my life.  He paid little attention to me, but I recollect that by the time we had settled ourselves at Tempe I was afraid of him.  Two or three times he whipped me, but no more severely than was the custom among parents.  Other little boys were whipped just as hard, and still were not afraid of their fathers.  I think now that I was afraid of him because my mother was.  I can not tell how he looked then, except that he was a tall stooped man with a yellowish beard all over his face and talked in a sort of whine to others, and in a sharp domineering way to my mother.  To me he scarcely ever spoke at all.  At Tempe he had some sort of a shop in which he put up a dark-colored liquid—­a patent medicine—­which he sold by traveling about the country.  I remember that he used to complain of lack of money and of the expense of keeping me; and that my mother made clothes for people in the village.

Tempe was a little village near the Erie Canal somewhere between Rome and Syracuse.  There was a dam and water-power in Tempe or near there, which, I think, was the overflow from a reservoir built as a water-supply for the Erie Canal—­but I am not sure.  I can not find Tempe on the map; but many names have been changed since those days.  I think it was farther west than Canastota, but I am not sure—­it was a long time ago.

2

Once, for some reason of his own, and when he had got some money in an unexpected way, Rucker took my mother and me to Oneida for an outing.  My mother and I camped by the roadside while Rucker went somewhere to a place where a lot of strangers were starting a colony of Free Lovers.  After he returned he told my mother that we had been invited to join the colony, and argued that it would be a good thing for us all; but my mother got very mad at him, and started to walk home leading me by the hand.  She sobbed and cried as we walked along, especially after it grew late in the afternoon and Rucker had not overtaken us with the horse and democrat wagon.  She seemed insulted, and broken-hearted; and was angry for the only time I remember.  When we at last heard the wagon clattering along behind us in the woods, we sat down on a big rock by the side of the road, and Rucker meanly pretended not to see us until he had driven on almost out of sight.  My mother would