After my niece, Rose Vimont, had been with us for probably a year I became satisfied that she had not succeeded in winning the affections of my wife. Dr. C. R. Pomeroy had been our pastor at the Centenary Methodist church for several years and had removed to Emporia, Kansas, and taken charge of the State Normal School at that place. As Rose desired to prepare herself for a teacher I went with her to Emporia in the spring of 1877 and placed her at the institution under the care of Dr. Pomeroy and his wife, where she remained for twelve months, when school was suspended by reason of a fire which destroyed the buildings. Rose returned to Des Moines and the following year, 1878, she taught a small school in the brick schoolhouse on the northwest corner of my farm, and had a room and boarded with my half brother, Charles R. Afterwards she obtained a situation in the public schools of the city of Des Moines and became a very successful teacher, remaining in the city some fifteen years or more. Soon after the purchase of my farm, in order further to promote the interests of my brother and give him employment, I became interested in the purchase and raising of pure bred short-horn cattle, committing to my brother the immediate supervision and care of them on the farm, and building some extensive barns and other out-buildings. I subsequently bought from George Sneer 126 acres of valuable land in section 20, township 79, range 24, and afterwards in July, 1879, bought thirty-seven acres adjoining the tract that I had purchased of Edinburn, making a part of the home farm. I also bought adjoining the same original tract eleven acres from a man by the name of Parks. Subsequently I contracted with a man by the name of Miller to put down a bore hole on my land near the barns, with the hope of procuring artesian water for my cattle and a flowing well. In this I was disappointed, but I required the man to keep an accurate journal of the different strata through which he bored, and at the distance of about 140 feet below the surface he went through a valuable strata of coal averaging from four and one-half to six feet in thickness. I subsequently leased the right to take coal from these lands to the Keystone Coal Company, under which lease they sunk a shaft and operated a mine on the home place for about thirteen years. The royalty from the coal during these thirteen years more than paid the original purchase price of this land, which cost me originally only about fifty dollars per acre.