Cognac, or the best Irish or Scotch whisky.

Wilkins halted his team and went into the whisky-mill, where the
owner, Robinson, was throwing charcoal into the furnace under his
boiler with a long-handled shovel. He was an enterprising Englishman
who was wooing the smiles of fortune with better prospects of success
than the slow, hard-working farmer. I had seen him first
in West Joliet in '49, when he was travelling around buying corn for
his distillery. He was a handsome man, about thirty years of age,
five feet ten inches in height, had been well educated, was quite
able to hold his own among the men of the West, and accommodated
himself to their manners and habits.

There were three other farmers present, and their talk drifted from
one thing to another until it at last settled on the question of the
relative advantages of life in England and the States. Robinson took
the part of England, Wilkins stuck to the States; he said:

"A poor man has no chance at home; he is kept down by landlords, and
can never get a farm of his own. In Illinois I am a free man, and
have no one to lord it over me. If I had lived and slaved in England
for a hundred years I should never have been any better off, and now
I have a farm as good as any in Will County, and am just as good a
man as e'er another in it."

Now Wilkins was only a small man, shorter by four inches than
Robinson, who towered above him, and at once resented the claim to
equality. He said:

"You as good as any other man, are you? Why there ain't a more