When I was a few weeks turned of eleven years old, my father, then forty-four years of age, became infected with the western fever then well on its way of depopulating New England, and, selling his rough Vermont farm at a better price than it would fetch now in the same extent and condition, entered upon what at the time was thought not unfairly to be the serious journey to the wilds of Michigan. Accordingly early in September, 1837, we set forth, making altogether an emigration of nineteen persons, one being Miss Julia Hatch, who became Mrs. Hamilton Scott a little later on. Following advice, we took with us our entire household effects, including a large cook-stove of the Woolson patent, one of the very earliest to succeed the huge fire-places over which our mothers and grandmothers back to the Mayflower in unbroken line roasted, baked and stewed themselves along with the meals they prepared. There must have been a Puritan toughness of texture in this stove, for it served right on unremittingly for not less than thirty years, as valiant, irascible and friendly a creature as ever woman had at need. All effects were packed in boxes, and the ingenuity of the Twenty-mile Stream valley was sorely taxed to fit boxes to the furniture, or, more properly, the furniture to the boxes, since there must be a limit to the dimensions of the latter. This difficulty was met by sawing off any contumacious limb or projection from articles of unreasonable size, such as tables and bedsteads,--a rough surgery from which no subsequent care ever quite restored the afflicted members, leaving them rickety and rheumatic ever after. Conveyance through New England was then by wheel, and so we moved over the Green Mountains to Troy, my uncle Zaccheus Bates driving the wagon wherein jolted my three brothers and myself, a cargo of youngsters irrepressible and volatile to such a degree that when he handed us back to the parental care after two trying days, my uncle must have thanked God and breathed freer.