But don’t you want to hear how we like it, out here, in this great country? Oh, happy as clams! and we haven’t been homesick, either, only once in a while, when it seemed so queer getting “naturalized,” that we couldn’t help “keepin’ up a terrible thinkin’.” By the way, we were all sick last week,--no, not all; Emeline and the baby were not. George and Sarah and I all had the doctor at once. I was taken first, and had the most violent attack, and got well soonest. Our complaint was remittent fever, which is only another name for chills and fever, I suspect. I felt ashamed to get “the chills” so soon after coming here, and I believe the doctor was kind enough to call it something else. I did have one regular “chill,” though; the blood settled under my nails, and though I didn’t shake, I shivered “like I had the agey.” That’s our Western phraseology. Blue pills and quinine I thought would be the death of me; but I believe they cured me after all. I had to leave school for a week, but yesterday I commenced again. My school! Oh, the times I do have there with the young Suckers! I have to walk rather more than a mile to it, and it is in just the most literal specimen of a log-cabin that you can form any idea of. ’Tis built of unhewn logs, laid “criss-cross,” as we used to say down in the lane; the chinks filled up with mud, except those which are not filled up “at all, at all,” and the chimney is stuck on behind the house. The floor lies as easy as it can on the ground, and the benches are, some of them (will you believe it?), very much like our sofa. They never had a school in this district before, and my “ideas” are beginning to “shoot” very naturally, most of them. I asked one new scholar yesterday how old she was. “Don’t know,” she said, “never was inside of a school-house before.” Another big girl got hold of my rubbers the other day, “Ouch,” said she, “be them Ingin robbers? I never seen any ’fore.” Some of them are bright enough to make up for all this, and on the whole I enjoy being “schoolma’am” very much. I have not seen a snake since I came here, and if I didn’t have to pass through such a sprinkling of cattle on my way to school, I shouldn’t have a morsel of trouble. Everybody turns his “cattle-brutes” out on the open prairie to feed, and they will get right into my path, and such a mooing and bellowing as they make! George has three big cows and two little ones, and two calves, and a horse, and ten hens, and a big pig and a little one: only the big pig has dug a subterranean passage, and “runned away.” And I don’t milk the cows, and I won’t learn to, if I can help it, because they will be so impolite as to turn round and stare me in the face always when I go near them.