passed to him by the onlookers, he pulled up, and I won the race
quite out of breath.

On the present occasion we were in ample time, and my journey ended
at Shokan, from which place I walked the few miles to Tongore, in
the late April afternoon. The little frogs were piping, and I
remember how homesick the familiar spring sound made me. As I
walked along the road near sundown with this sound in my ears, I
saw coming toward me a man with a gait as familiar as was the piping
of the frogs. He turned out to be our neighbor Warren Scudder, and
how delighted I was to see him in that lonesome land! He had sold
a yoke of oxen down there and had been down to deliver them. The
home ties pulled very strongly at sight of him. Warren's three
boys, Reub and Jack and Smith, were our nearest boy neighbors. His
father, old Deacon Scudder, was one of the notable characters of the
town. Warren himself had had some varied experiences. He was one
of the leaders in the anti-rent war of ten years before. Indeed,
he was chief of the band of "Indians" that shot Steel, the sheriff,
at Andes, and it was charged that the bullet from his pistol was
the one that did the fatal work. At any rate, he had had to flee
the country, escaping concealed in a peddler's cart, while close
pressed by the posse. He went South and was absent several years.
After the excitement of the murder and the struggle between the two
factions had died down, he returned and was not molested. And here
he was in the April twilight, on my path to Tongore, and the sight
of him cheered my heart.


I began my school Monday morning, April the 11th, 1854, and continued
it for six months, teaching the common branches to twenty or thirty