I moved the same day, got a pleasant room and a snug bed, good, substantial food, and, above all, good and friendly treatment, so that from the time I came there until the day I left, I felt as if I had been a child of the house. Dr. Ober, who was a religious man, belonged to the Baptist Church, and as I now lived under its beneficient influence, and also became acquainted with the Swedish Baptist Pastor, Rev. G. Palmquist, and a few others who constituted the nucleus of the First Swedish Baptist Church of America. I became a member of their society before spring and would probably have continued a member of this denomination, if circumstances which were beyond my control, had not brought me to other fields of action and other surroundings. This winter passed in a very pleasant manner. In the afternoon I attended an English school, and in the evening I gave instructions in English to other young men and women. The friendship of Dr. Ober and his wife never failed, and many years afterwards I was a welcome guest at their home in La Crosse, Wis., to which place they had moved from Moline. Both of them now slumber under the sod, but their many good deeds shall live for ever. My father was much pleased with the great west, and he wrote back to the rest of our family in Sweden to come to this country the next summer, and in May I started to meet them in Boston. As there were no railroads to Moline, I took a steamboat to Galena, and thence the stage-coach to Freeport, and from there to Chicago by rail. The vessel carrying my mother and the party with her was three months on the ocean, and there was great scarcity of provisions on board. The ship at last arrived, in the month of July, and a couple of days later the whole party, consisting of about two hundred, took the train for the west, I volunteering as their guide and interpreter. All went well until about one hundred miles east of Chicago, when the baggage car attached to our train in front caught fire. It was thought best to try to reach a station, and the burning train sped on at the rate of sixty miles an hour. The scene was a frightful one, the cars crammed full of frightened emigrants, the flames hissing like serpents from car to car, windows cracking, people screaming, and women fainting, all at the same time looking to me, who was not yet twenty years of age, for protection and deliverance.