On the contrary, even when sick we were held to our tasks as long as we could stand.  Once in harvest-time I had the mumps and was unable to swallow any food except milk, but this was not allowed to make any difference, while I staggered with weakness and sometimes fell headlong among the sheaves.  Only once was I allowed to leave the harvest-field—­when I was stricken down with pneumonia.  I lay gasping for weeks, but the Scotch are hard to kill and I pulled through.  No physician was called, for father was an enthusiast, and always said and believed that God and hard work were by far the best doctors.

None of our neighbors were so excessively industrious as father; though nearly all of the Scotch, English, and Irish worked too hard, trying to make good homes and to lay up money enough for comfortable independence.  Excepting small garden-patches, few of them had owned land in the old country.  Here their craving land-hunger was satisfied, and they were naturally proud of their farms and tried to keep them as neat and clean and well-tilled as gardens.  To accomplish this without the means for hiring help was impossible.  Flowers were planted about the neatly kept log or frame houses; barnyards, granaries, etc., were kept in about as neat order as the homes, and the fences and corn-rows were rigidly straight.  But every uncut weed distressed them; so also did every ungathered ear of grain, and all that was lost by birds and gophers; and this overcarefulness bred endless work and worry.

As for money, for many a year there was precious little of it in the country for anybody.  Eggs sold at six cents a dozen in trade, and five-cent calico was exchanged at twenty-five cents a yard.  Wheat brought fifty cents a bushel in trade.  To get cash for it before the Portage Railway was built, it had to be hauled to Milwaukee, a hundred miles away.  On the other hand, food was abundant,—­eggs, chickens, pigs, cattle, wheat, corn, potatoes, garden vegetables of the best, and wonderful melons as luxuries.  No other wild country I have ever known extended a kinder welcome to poor immigrants.  On the arrival in the spring, a log house could be built, a few acres ploughed, the virgin sod planted with corn, potatoes, etc., and enough raised to keep a family comfortably the very first year; and wild hay for cows and oxen grew in abundance on the numerous meadows.  The American settlers were wisely content with smaller fields and less of everything, kept indoors during excessively hot or cold weather, rested when tired, went off fishing and hunting at the most favorable times and seasons of the day and year, gathered nuts and berries, and in general tranquilly accepted all the good things the fertile wilderness offered.

After eight years of this dreary work of clearing the Fountain Lake farm, fencing it and getting it in perfect order, building a frame house and the necessary outbuildings for the cattle and horses,—­after all this had been victoriously accomplished, and we had made out to escape with life,—­father bought a half-section of wild land about four or five miles to the eastward and began all over again to clear and fence and break up other fields for a new farm, doubling all the stunting, heartbreaking chopping, grubbing, stump-digging, rail-splitting, fence-building, barn-building, house-building, and so forth.