Economically, our cows ought to be made to do a good deal of the work of the farms.  I have always believed this; but now a German expert has proved it.  I read about it the other day in a bulletin put out by the Agricultural Department; but I proved it in Vandemark Township before the man was born that wrote the bulletin.  If not pushed too hard, cows will work and give almost as much milk as if not worked at all.  This statement of course won’t apply to the fancy cows which are high-power milk machines, and need to be packed in cotton, and kept in satin-lined stalls; but to such cows as farmers have, and always will have, it does apply.

I was sorry to leave the Prestons, they were such whole-souled, earnest people; and before I did leave them I was a full-fledged Abolitionist so far as belief was concerned.  I never did become active, however, in spiriting slaves from one station to another of the U.G.  Railway.

I drove out to the highway, and turning my prow to the west, I joined again in the stream of people swarming westward.  The tide had swollen in the week during which I had laid by at the Prestons’.  The road was rutted, poached deep where wet and beaten hard where dry, or pulverized into dust by the stream of emigration.  Here we went, oxen, cows, mules, horses; coaches, carriages, blue jeans, corduroys, rags, tatters, silks, satins, caps, tall hats, poverty, riches; speculators, missionaries, land-hunters, merchants; criminals escaping from justice; couples fleeing from the law; families seeking homes; the wrecks of homes seeking secrecy; gold-seekers bearing southwest to the Overland Trail; politicians looking for places in which to win fame and fortune; editors hunting opportunities for founding newspapers; adventurers on their way to everywhere; lawyers with a few books; Abolitionists going to the Border War; innocent-looking outfits carrying fugitive slaves; officers hunting escaped negroes; and most numerous of all, homeseekers “hunting country”—­a nation on wheels, an empire in the commotion and pangs of birth.  Down I went with the rest, across ferries, through Dodgeville, Mineral Point and Platteville, past a thousand vacant sites for farms toward my own farm so far from civilization, shot out of civilization by the forces of civilization itself.

I saw the old mining country from Mineral Point to Dubuque, where lead had been dug for many years, and where the men lived who dug the holes and were called Badgers, thus giving the people of Wisconsin their nickname as distinguished from the Illinois people who came up the rivers to work in the spring, and went back in the fall, and were therefore named after a migratory fish and called Suckers; and at last, I saw from its eastern bank far off to the west, the bluffy shores of Iowa, and down by the river the keen spires and brick and wood buildings of the biggest town I had seen since leaving Milwaukee the town of Dubuque.

I camped that night in the northwestern corner of Illinois, in a regular city of movers, all waiting their turns at the ferry which crossed the Mississippi to the Land of Promise.