Near the school lived a family named Babcock, with four well-grown boys.  One of them used often to come over at noon to see one of the teachers.  One noon, on running to the schoolroom after something that I wanted, I was horrified to see my loved teacher struggling to prevent the young fellow from kissing her.  I felt very sorry for her, and on going home promptly reported the outrage to my mother.  She evidently did not approve, but did not make as much of a demonstration over it as I had expected.  I doubt now, if the teacher was as greatly in need of my sympathy as I then thought.  The Babcocks all went to the war, as I am told, and one of them became colonel of his regiment.  He came home to be fatally and mysteriously shot one night on his way to his room in Chicago; the why and how were never revealed.

The winter after I was six years old I went to a school taught by a fine young man named Martin Piper, a relative of Uncle Ben’s.  The next summer he enlisted in the Mexican War with another of our young neighbors, John Bradshaw.  I saw the volunteers from Watertown filling two wagons that carried them to Milwaukee, and I could not keep the tears back, for I feared I should never see John and Martin again.  And so it was; they both perished at Vera Cruz.

My last winter’s school was taught by my father.  I remember that we used to cross the river, which only froze along the edges, on cakes of ice which he would cut out and pole across.  The school closed in the spring with an “exhibition,” consisting of declamations, dialogues, a little “play,” and a spelling contest.  The whole countryside was there, and about thirty of us youngsters were put up in the attic, which was floored over with loose boards, to make room for our elders.  The only light we had was what percolated up through the cracks, and all that we could see of the exhibition was through them.  As we hustled around, sampling them to see where we could see best, we made a good deal of disturbance.

The best place, next the chimney, we were driven back from, for repeated burning had weakened the support. (The beam next to the chimney used to catch fire nearly every day, and we younger ones used to watch it and report to the teacher, who would calmly throw a dipper of water up and put the fire out for the time being.) A fat woman sat under the dangerous place that evening, and made a great outcry if we came near to enjoy the desirable outlook—­stout people always seem fearful that something will fall on them.  I remember also that her little girl, a pretty creature in curls and a pink dress, spoke “Mary had a little lamb,” by having it “lined out” to her.

Our schoolhouse was so set in a noble grove of oaks, elms and maples with a heavy undergrowth, that we could not be seen from the road.  Nearly every day droves of cattle went by, and we used to run up through the thicket to see them.  It must have been an odd sight to the drovers to see a dozen or more little half-scared faces peering out of the brush, and no building in sight.  They would often give us a noisy salute, whereupon we would scamper back, telling of our narrow escape from dangerous beasts and men.