The uniformly rich soil of the Illinois and Wisconsin prairies produced so close and tall a growth of grasses for fires that no tree could live on it.  Had there been no fires, these fine prairies, so marked a feature of the country, would have been covered by the heaviest forests.  As soon as the oak openings in our neighborhood were settled, and the farmers had prevented running grass-fires, the grubs grew up into trees and formed tall thickets so dense that it was difficult to walk through them and every trace of the sunny “openings” vanished.

[Illustration:  THE HICKORY HILL HOUSE, BUILT IN 1857]

We called our second farm Hickory Hill, from its many fine hickory trees and the long gentle slope leading up to it.  Compared with Fountain Lake farm it lay high and dry.  The land was better, but it had no living water, no spring or stream or meadow or lake.  A well ninety feet deep had to be dug, all except the first ten feet or so in fine-grained sandstone.  When the sandstone was struck, my father, on the advice of a man who had worked in mines, tried to blast the rock; but from lack of skill the blasting went on very slowly, and father decided to have me do all the work with mason’s chisels, a long, hard job, with a good deal of danger in it.  I had to sit cramped in a space about three feet in diameter, and wearily chip, chip, with heavy hammer and chisels from early morning until dark, day after day, for weeks and months.  In the morning, father and David lowered me in a wooden bucket by a windlass, hauled up what chips were left from the night before, then went away to the farm work and left me until noon, when they hoisted me out for dinner.  After dinner I was promptly lowered again, the forenoon’s accumulation of chips hoisted out of the way, and I was left until night.

One morning, after the dreary bore was about eighty feet deep, my life was all but lost in deadly choke-damp,—­carbonic acid gas that had settled at the bottom during the night.  Instead of clearing away the chips as usual when I was lowered to the bottom, I swayed back and forth and began to sink under the poison.  Father, alarmed that I did not make any noise, shouted, “What’s keeping you so still?” to which he got no reply.  Just as I was settling down against the side of the wall, I happened to catch a glimpse of a branch of a bur-oak tree which leaned out over the mouth of the shaft.  This suddenly awakened me, and to father’s excited shouting I feebly murmured, “Take me out.”  But when he began to hoist he found I was not in the bucket and in wild alarm shouted, “Get in!  Get in the bucket and hold on!  Hold on!” Somehow I managed to get into the bucket, and that is all I remembered until I was dragged out, violently gasping for breath.