wagons, sleighs, plows, etc., were mostly made of wood; the pitchforks, grain shovels, grain and garden rakes, and many other tools were all made entirely of wood, at home. The medicine used in sickness was largely from the garden herbs, for book doctors and apothecary shops were mighty scarce in those days.

I must not fail to mention the old moss-covered wooden bucket that hung in the well, suspended by a grapevine rope attached to the end of a long pole up in the air above the well, the pole resting in a long fork planted perpendicularly in the ground at proper distance from the well, with weights on the lower end of the pole to aid in raising the water. Who, that can remember those days, but will not agree with me that they were happy ones, and that we lived well and dressed fine? I know we were independent, but I suspect that if in this present day a handsome young couple dressed in the style and costume of that day, in their neat and well-fitting apparel of homspun, were to walk into one of the churches of Lee’s Summit, they would attract widespread attention and be the observed of all observers. Only one other thought just here: in 1840 we attended school at Leesburg, just over the line in Harrison Co., a village of some two hundred inhabitants, and of the grown-up residents of that time we can call to mind only one that is now alive, that is Mr. H. E. Boswell (a son of Gen. William Boswell, who commanded a Kentucky brigade in the war of 1812), the proprietor of the Ashland Hotel at Lexington, Ky., and uncle of Mr. John T. Boswell, of Pleasant Hill, Mo. What a stern realization of the shortness of life!

But I must abbreviate and bring this to a close, else it will find a place in your waste basket. This is a very fine agricultural country around Sherman, reminding me very much of home, though I have seen no place as yet that I would think of exchanging my Lee’s Summit borne for, and I shall return more than ever wedded to it and my neighbors and friends. My visit here in Sherman, in every sense, is very similar to that in Little Rock, and in a few days I shall just have to break away from these tender ties and pursue my journey south to the Gulf coast at Galveston, going by one route and returning by another, traveling almost entirely by daylight and stopping over at night for the two-fold reason that I can see the country and rest better at the hotels at a less cost than

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