Although I was born in the sunny South where magnolias bloom and mockingbirds sing all winter long, my first vivid recollection of life was upon this bleak Kansas farm, hot and wind-swept in summer, cold and desolate in winter. The rigid climate of this new plains country home was in such marked contrast to the mild and even temperature of my mother’s native heavily timbered state as to her long to go back to her old home. It was eight wilderness miles to Powhattan, the post-office; five miles to Granada, the trading post; and one mile to the nearest neighbors—Rube and Anne Wolfley. The mill that made our sorghum molasses—nearly every farmer grew a patch of cane for making molasses to go with corn-bread, the staple diet—one mile off from Powhattan, was owned by Charley Smith, the same Charley Smith who had in earlier days, been keeper of a station (his home ) on the old John Brown “underground railroad,” where runaway Negro slaves, being transported to Canada, were in hiding through the day. I know it was the Charley Smith place, for Ben Summers, our hired man, said it still smelled of “niggers.” But of course it didn’t. That was Ben ’ s way of opening a sizeable tale about Mr. Brown and his underground railroad. And I wouldn’t know how far it was to the mill that ground our corn-meal, but I do know there was one—for we had no bread other than cornbread for months on end. Only on rare occasions would we have “lightbread”—made of wheat flower, of course. The cornbread my mother usually made was not the cornpone customary in the South. Cracklin ’ bread and seasoned cornbread was much better—that is, for most palates. I wish I could have some of it now. But there was one traveling salesman, Hugh Graham, who preferred the cornpone. He would wire the hotel here of his expected arrival, which meant that for breakfast, dinner, or supper, he wanted cornpone. I think the cornpone was made of cornmeal, salt, and water. I recall that Ben Summers had gone “acourtin” Betsy Porter that evening, when my parents were shelling corn, by candle-light, on a sheet spread upon the kitchen floor, to take to the mill—probably the Reiderer mill east of Holton — when a big bullsnake which had crept in through a displaced chink in the log house, slithered across the sheet, gliding over the corn, and out an open door. The matter was debated, seriously—then it was decided the hogs should have that corn. My father and mother, with their three small children, came to Kansas from Nashville, Tennessee, in 1865. They came by steamboat on the Cumberland, the Mississippi and Missouri rivers to Atchison. The family was met there by my uncle Nick, father’s only brother, with an ox-team, taking most of two days to drive us to his home on Wolfley creek. That farm is now owned by William Mast.