IN early days there was an empty cabin in our neighborhood at one time, and a man came along and wanted to teach school, if he could get fifteen scholars he would teach three months for one dollar and fifty cents per scholar, and would take his pay in corn, wheat, pork, beans, honey, beeswax, or anything, and he boarded around among the families who sent pupils. All right; and the men went into the woods and cut some “linn” (linden) trees and split them open and hewed some of the worst splinters off the flat side and bored holes and put legs in the round side and made us some good benches; we took the oxen and hauled up some wood and Mr. Anderson set in to teach. He did not know much more than a goat, but that made no difference. Brady Phelps’ children would fetch their little, speckled, bench-legged “fiste”, and he would stay in the house, under their bench, and when we would stick our feet back under the bench and touch him he would bite us on the heel. Frank Perryman was just about my age and just about as mean; at the noon hour he and I would get a wild grape-vine, and one take hold of either end and get outside the door, then send a boy in to run him out, and when he jumped to go over the grape-vine we would fetch a yank and throw that dog twenty feet high; when we had sent him up a few times he quit the school of his own free will and accord.