I also wrote to my parents telling them what they might look
for in the mails, and cautioning them never to have it printed, for the
writing was so ungrammatical and the spelling so incorrect that it would
be no credit to me.
I afterward learned that in time they received the bundle of paper and
read it through and through, and circulated it around the neighborhood
till it was badly worn, and laid it away for future perusal when their
minds should incline that way. But the farm house soon after took fire
and burned, my labor going up in smoke.
When the news of this reached me I resolved to try to forget all the
trials, troubles and hardships I had gone through, and which I had
almost lived over again as I wrote them down, and I said to myself that
I would not talk about them more than I could help, the sooner to have
them vanish, and never write them down again, but a few years ago an
accident befell me so that I could not work, and I back-slid from my
determination when I was persuaded so earnestly by many friends to write
the account which appeared a few years ago in the Santa Clara Valley now
the Pacific Tree and Vine, edited by H.A. Brainard, at San Jose,
California. The diary was lost, and from memory alone the facts have
been rehearsed, and it is but fair to tell the reader that the hardest
and worst of it has never been told nor will it ever be.
CHAPTER XVI.
McCloud and I now took his skiff, and for two days floated down the
Wisconsin River till we reached the Mississippi, boarded the first
steamboat we could hail, and let our own little craft adrift.
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