which to handle the hogs after they were killed and scalded. A large barrel was planted by this platform leaning against it; a pile of boulders or "Niggerhead" stones about the size of a small child's head, was provided; a good log fire made, into which these stones were thrown and heated; the barrel was filled half full of water, and when the first hog was killed, enough of these stones were thrown into the water to make it scalding hot; then the hog was inserted into the barrel, first one end then the other, and the quickest possible work was done in pulling off the hair and bristles while hot, and the hair in condition to slip. The work was exciting, and one of my earliest recollections is of trying to help father and my older brothers pull off the hair, no doubt being more trouble and hindrance than help.

When the first hog was thoroughly cleaned and scraped with knives, the two hamstrings were opened and a strong stick about two feet long and sharpened at each end, was inserted so as to catch the hamstrings and spread the hind legs and the hog was hung snout down over a pole properly placed for the purpose. Then the process was repeated with each hog until the day's killing was completed. From eight to ten young hogs were required for the family. It was a hard and exciting day's work, commencing before daylight and closing after dark, leaving a row of white, clean porkers hanging in perfect line to become cold by the frosty winter night. The youngsters of the family had a happy day watching the exciting work, not unfrequently slying cutting off a fat tail and roasting it in the log fire, thus getting a fine bit of fresh pork of an exceedingly delicious flavor.

A fine grove of sugar trees was found in the wood pasture, on the farm. From the flow of the sap in the early spring we made sugar and syrup enough to last the family through the year. This sugarmaking time was another interesting event, especially for the kids. Father with axe and adz made a large number of small wooden troughs, each sufficient to hold the drippings from one tree for

twenty-four hours. He then took hard elder stems which he cut into eight inch lengths, pushed out the pith and inserted one each into a sugar tree at such an angle as to drain the sap into the trough.

Then began the process of gathering the sugar-water into tanks at the sugar camps every morning. When a sufficient quantity was on hand, the boiling started in large iron kettles over log fires, under a shed in the woods. Several days and nights of constant, uniform boiling was required to convert the water into syrup and a still longer time to make the sugar. And here around the camp fires were happy times for old and young alike; especially was it fascinating for the children when the syrup began to get good, and the sugar began to harden.

These special seasons became events of deep and romantic interest in my boyhood life, and remain in my old age precious memories of bright and happy times.

In our cabin suspended to the joists hung a frame work of nicely smoothed poles one foot apart. On these, in the early winter season hung in long thin slices to dry for pies and stewing, rich golden pumpkins. And later on, when cur orchard trees began to bear abundant fruit, the roof was covered with apples and peaches nicely pared and cut into suitable sized pieces for sun-drying, and in quantities sufficient to last until the following season came around again. Thus father and mother, always frugal and forehanded, provided dried pumpkins, dried fruit, and filled the cellar with apples, potatoes, turnips, cabbages, and other vegetables, besides a barrel or two of cider, a quantity of popcorn and other things needed for winter use.

For years cornmeal was the only provision for bread. The Kentucky corn dodgers and hoe-cake furnished the staple bread supply. Mush and milk provided the evening meal for the family, was a luxury after a hard day's work, and was sufficiently soporific to make sleep sound and restful.

Later on a grist mill at which wheat could be ground into flour was estab

lished. Then we began to raise wheat in small quantities. The first process of threshing out the wheat was by laying the sheaves on the barn floor in a row around the wall, and driving the horses two abreast around and around over it. To separate the grain from the chaff two men would toss it up in a linen sheet when the wind was blowing.

To show the remarkable capacity and resourcefulness of my father, I will speak of two things he did that were unusual among pioneers of the time. When he found he needed a good deal of leather for shoes, harnesses, and other things, he constructed a tanning vat, gathered the kind of bark necessary to make good leather and gathered a few hides and made the leather required for all the needs of the farm. He also raised a small crop of hemp which he cut and cured and broke and hackled, and made into rope of different sizes for clothes-lines, bed-cord and other purposes. The improved beds of those early days had bed-cord bottoms upon which the straw and feather mattresses or ticks were placed, thus making very comfortable beds. For making these ropes a suitable frame called a ropewalk was made and placed in an open place in the orchard.

Subduing the forest and making a farm and supporting a large family and getting ahead in the world was a slow and difficult process for my father and other pioneers in those days. When he produced something to sell, there was no market place, no demand and no price. When he had wheat to sell he had to haul it in a wagon to Madison or Lawrenceburg on the Ohio river, over a hundred miles away and get 371⁄2 cents per bushel.

Corn sold for about fifteen cents and oats for eight to ten cents per bushel. We fed our corn to hogs and drove the hoge to Cincinnati, about one hundred and fifty miles, and got about one dollar and fifty cents per hundred pounds. Think of starting a bunch of fat hogs today on a drive like that! Every hog in the drove would give out and lie down in the first mile.

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Dressed pork at the farm sold for one dollar per hundred pounds. Good farm horses sold for twenty-five dollars each; milk cows for five dollars; chickens for fifty cents per dozen; fat turkeys, tame or wild, for fifteen cents each; butter for five cents per pound; eggs for three cents per dozen. These figures are accurate, but will seem incredible to the reader of the present time, when the high cost of living is perplexing statesmen, scientists and students of economics.

Imported articles were higher priced. Coffee cost fifty to sixty cents a pound; tea one dollar and fifty cents; muslin seventy-five cents per yard; calico forty cents; wall paper for window shades, twelve and a half cents per yard; foolscap paper twenty-five cents per quire; a paper of tacks twenty-five cents.

It was a great event for us boys to go with father with a drove of hogs to Cincinnati. The trip required about ten days. A wagon was taken along to carry provisions for men and horses. Feed for the hogs was easilly procured from the farms along the route. Frequently stray hogs would fall in with the herd and not be discovered for a day or two. These were called "cider hogs," and they would be traded for cider, apples or gingerbread.

In 1844 the Baptish Church founded a college at Franklin which was about ten miles south of our home place. This was the first college in that part of the State. I refer to this college because of its effect upon the Clark family. My brother, George W., ten years older than I, got a taste for books and a desire for education from reading a new magazine called, "Fowler and Wells Phrenological Journal." He became so infatuated with books and so fond of reading that he would clandestinely take a book to the field, and the corn plowing suffered neglect while he sat in a fence corner improving his mind. Father was too good a farmer to allow the weeds to grow and was too busy in his shop to watch the boy, so he put a cow bell on the horse so as to know when the plowing

stopped. On one occasion he thought the sound of the bell was singularly monotonous and went down to the field where he found George reading in a fence corner, regularly pulling a string which was attached to the cow bell. Whereupon another, and it was hoped more effective, remedy was applied.

When George was about eighteen years old he coaxed father to let him go to Franklin College, and it became my duty and pleasure each Monday morning to ride behind George on horse back to Franklin College and take the horse back; and to go to Franklin every Friday afternoon and again ride behind him on the way home. Thus began a college career for George which he followed in higher institutions until he had procured a finished education and became a successful lawyer. And I may say here that this Franklin College gave me indirectly an inclination to later seek college life and college training.

Franklin College is still a flourishing institution, though it had one serious interruption. When the Civil War made a strong demand for young men this college was obliged to suspend, its last term having but two students, and they both cripples and unfit for military duty.

After a while there was a little grist mill started on Sugar Creek about four miles east of our place. My father would fill a two-bushel sack with shelled corn and lay it across old Peggy's back and set me on top of the sack and start me to the mill. I had a hard time of it keeping the sack balanced. When I got there I had difficulty to get the miller to help me get the sack of corn in the mill. There was always a long line of fellows waiting their turn. The mill had but one run of burrs and ground slowly; many times it would be late in the night when I would get home. The miller would take out about one-fourth of the corn as his toll.

I remember a funny story about this mill. A neighbor boy, whose mental faculties were dull, grew very impatient over the slow progress and growing tired waiting, said to the miller, "Do you know,

Mr. Miller, I could eat that meal faster than you can grind it?" "Yes," replied the miller, "But how long could you keep it up?" "I could keep on eating it till I starved to death."

ror.

A few miles south of our farm was a great swamp filled with water and dense underbrush. It was known to every settler as the "Great Gulf," and was a famous resort for wild game. To us children it was a place if mystery and terAnother place of interest and mystery a few miles north was the "Windfall." We only thought of it as a celebrated game resort and a curious condition of nature. For a long distance as it seems to me now, miles and miles, the forrest had been laid flat, the trees tumbled in heaps, unrooted, crisscrossed, and piled in strange shapes. We had not then heard of cyclones and tornadoes. But some terrific twister had done the deed.

Well, these two mysterious places were the last game resorts in all that region, and as late as in the forties, hunters were in the habit of organizing a drive of deer from one to the other place, while the sharp shooters stationed on the runway near our house, brought down the game. In 1854 a deer was shot not far from our place and in the same year a catamount chased the hogs of one of our neighbors in broad daylight and in their fright they ran into the dwelling for protection. In the same year forty-seven wild turkeys came feeding close around the house.

"The Great Gulf" was in Clark township and in recent years has been cleared out and drained and has made that the richest township in the county. So with the disappearance of the "Great Gulf" and of "The Windfall," the romantic and mysterious spots of my childhood have long since passed from the face of the earth, but still linger in memory's gallery as distinct pictures of the long ago.

There was near by a wild pigeons' roost, a deep forest where at twilight innumerable wild pigeons would assemble and fill all the limbs and twigs and spend the night. Occasionally when some

alarm would startle them they would all rise at once, and the roar and noise of the multitude of flopping wings could be heard for miles around, and sounded at our house like the roar of distant thunder.

Henry Musselman opened the first store in the township and sold goods for many years. He was a very active man, but totally devoid of book education, and could neither read nor write. He carried on a successful business and what was most remarkable, he did a credit business and kept his accounts in a most peculiar fashion. He could make figures, could add and subtract mentally. He kept his accounts by marking with a nail or pencil on the walls of his store, and each customer had his own place of account allotted to him. His memory was so well trained that he never forgot the right place nor the meaning of the marks, nor did any man dispute his account.

A debtor came in one day to settle, and among other items charged was a cheese. "But I never bought a cheese of you in my life," said the debtor.

"Didn't you? Well, what did you buy? Think."

The debtor thought awhile, "Ah," said

21

he, light breaking at last, "Yes, I bought a grindstone."

"Oh, so you did. I forgot to put the hole in it!"

On another occasion when Musselman was in Madison buying goods, a merchant asked him how he knew what per cent to charge seeing he was unacquainted with letters. "Well, I don't know any. thing about your per cent, but I do know that when I buy an article of you for a dollar and take it out to my place and sell it for two dollars, I am not losing anything."

Last year I motored from San Diego to Chicago and crossed Indiana and I marveled at the changes and prosperity of that State in the sixty-three years since I left there for Iowa. The best pike motor highways found on the route, railroads everywhere, great barns and splendid farms and signs of wealth everywhere.

Oliver P. Morton, the War Governor, made Indiana one of the greatest states in the Civil War and since the War it has taken high rank in politics and literature. There are no longer any signs of the pioneer life of my early days there.

T was in Paris that this curious exI am a man

Iperience befell me.

of sufficient means to live where I like, and to practice my profession of letters as I will. As I am without near relatives--and had at that time passed into a sedate middle age-the freedom that is at once the curse of the artistand his necessity, was mine.

The rooms in which I chose to spend the spring of 1908 were situated in an old house in the Rue Monge. By taking them I placed myself within easy walking distance of the Musee de Cluny, the Sorbonne, and the College de France.

My landlady, a wrinkled crone-with a skin like a walnut shell, and three hairs lashed to her head by a rusty black ribbon-assured me that none but the most select were to be accommodated at her house. Myself, and two young ladies-students-were already installed and she, Mme. Lilas, would receive no more. We were sufficient.

Sit

One day, towards evening, I was tempted by a delicate play of light and shadow and a peculiar amethyst hue which had invaded the sky, to seat myself at my window. In the street below, was the modern statue of the unfortunate Dolet, a printer burned at the stake in 1546-for "impiety and atheism." ting idly at the window, my mind peopled the street below me with those that had once frequented it. I imagined Dolet-gifted undoubtedly beyond his needs, exerting his powers at the cabaret de la Pomme de-Pin. It was growing darker, down the street, a gas lamp was lit, and blossomed like a flower in the purple light. Almost at the same moment, from the room next mine, a voice began singing. The song was the aria from La Traviata. I had not known the

room to be occupied. The two young ladies, students at the Sorbonne, did not sing.

It was a peculiar voice. It had range and power, and a curious bell like quality. It was well, almost marvelously, trained. And yet, as I listened to it, I was conscious of an aversion that was intolerable-that would turn to horror if I were forced to sit there and listen to it complete its song. A fear possessed me that it might stop, and that I should hear it speak. I could not imagine it speaking. Either I had been suddenly bereft of my senses, or I was listening to something abominable, unearthly.

It had finished the first verse, and without a pause-but in a louder tone, had commenced the second. As its volume was augmented, so was my fear. I rose from my chair and stumbled towards the door. In my clumsiness, I overturned a small table that fell with a crash. At once the voice stopped. There was no sound from that other room.

Have you ever been conscious of the presence of some one that a wall separates you from? You cannot see or hear them, but you can feel they are there, listening. The voice that had been singing, was attentive to me.

Walking as softly as I could, I gained the door into the upper hall. It was quite dark, Mme. Lilas being extremely economical. With as much dignity as was possible with extreme haste, I descended the stairs. My terror had gone, leaving me with the conviction that I was an elderly idiot. At the foot of the stairs was my landlady. I greeted her politely, but foreign to her custom, she did not seem anxious for any chat. I insisted with slight but definite pressure:

"How many are we here, Madame?"