One November day in 1877 the Newcomers unloaded from a Santa Fe train just then arrived in the city of Topeka, the exact time being about four o'clock in the afternoon. There was Mother Newcomer and five boys, the oldest being less than five years older than the youngest. On the platform they met Father Newcomer, who, together with a country lad, was awaiting the arrival. They gathered their baggage together, and the country boy led the way across the street to where his team, hitched to a farm wagon, was tied. Each of the horses was fastened with a heavy rope about the neck, which was looped over his nose and tied fast to a post, and each of them jumped and snorted and pulled at every movement or noise made by the train, which was still upon the track. The train pulled out, the Newcomers loaded up, the boy managed to quiet down the horses, and untied one after the other, holding the lines in his hand all the time; and after he had tied up the last rope, he jumped into the front of the wagon bed, holding fast to the lines or reins, and up the street they went. After a brief stop at Cole's grocery, and again at Manspeaker's, they started out over the diagonal road leading to the southeast from the city. At the top of the Highland Park hill they looked back and saw Topeka in the valley, and it looked like a cluster of brick houses, with scarcely a tree in sight; and yet it was beautiful in the glancing rays of the setting sun, and all of them felt that it was to be the center of that country which was their new home and the place of their future activity. Before it was fully dark the farm wagon had covered the distance of some fourteen miles from the city, traveling nearly all the way in a diagonal, southeasterly direction, and had wound up at the home of William Matney, on Lynn Creek, a mile below Tevis. The ride was a wonderful experience for the little Newcomers. They soon learned that one of the horses was named Greeley and the other Banks; but it was some years before they understood that these names indicated that the owner was a Democrat who knew the names of the candidates upon his ticket some five years before, when the horses were colts. The autumn sky was beautiful, and the light frosts had given a brown tinge to the prairie, and it seemed to them that every breath of air was a draught of the elixir of life.