After I had been in Broken Bow about two weeks I was offered a position in the mortgage loan office of Trefren and Hewitt. The latter was the first county clerk of Custer county. I held this position a few weeks, then resigned to take charge of the Berwyn school at the request of Mr. Charles Randall, the county superintendent. Berwyn was a village situated about ten miles east of Broken Bow. It consisted of one general merchandise store, a postoffice, depot, and a blacksmith shop. I shall never forget my first impression on arriving at Berwyn very early on that September morning. It was not daylight when the train stopped at the little depot, and what a feeling of loneliness crept over me as I watched that train speed on its way behind the eastern hills! I found my way to the home of J. O. Taylor (who was then living in the back end of his store building) and informed him that I was the teacher who had come to teach the school and asked him to direct me to my boarding place. Being a member of the school board, Mr. Taylor gave me the necessary information and then sent his hired man with a team and buggy to take me a mile farther east to the home of Ben Talbot, where I was to stay. The Talbot home was a little sod house consisting of two small rooms. On entering I found Mrs. Talbot preparing breakfast for the family. I was given a cordial welcome, and after breakfast started in company with Mrs. Talbot's little girl for the schoolhouse. The sense of loneliness which had taken possession of me on my way to this place began to be dispelled. I found Mrs. Talbot to be a woman of kind heart and generous impulses. She had two little girls, the older one being of school age. I could see the schoolhouse up on the side of a hill. It was made of sod and was about twelve by fifteen feet. The roof was of brush and weeds, with some sod; but I could see the blue sky by gazing up through the roof at almost any part of it. I looked out upon the hills and down the valley and wondered where the pupils were to come from, as I saw no houses and no evidence of habitation anywhere excepting Mr. Talbot's home. But by nine o'clock about twelve children had arrived from some place, I knew not where. I found in that little, obscure schoolhouse some of the brightest and best boys and girls it was ever my good fortune to meet. There soon sprang up between us a bond of sympathy. I sympathized with them in their almost total isolation from the world, and they in turn sympathized with me in my loneliness and homesickness.