Fortunately for the biographer, when Kern received his degree and returned to Howard county, his friend Morrow left Howard for Ann Arbor and the correspondence was continued for a time. In a letter dated April 4th, 1869, he gives a “short sketch of his meanderings” after leaving Ann Arbor, returning by way of Toledo and Peru, and finding “Howard county literally capped with mud.” “Nobody,” he adds, “pretends to travel with a wagon--such would be impossible. I never saw such a stretch of muddy country in all my eventful career.” But “notwithstanding the mud,” he found things “rather lively,” with many of the young women of the neighborhood calling to inspect the new attorney in their midst. “I have as yet made no definite arrangements as to practicing,” he writes. “I am thinking of going in with Milton Bell or Clark N. Pollard”--this probably being written in a spirit of fun, as the two men mentioned were prominent members of the bar. In the next sentences he adds--“If I don’t go in with them I will go into a firm with John Worth Kern, LL. B.” He was not in the best of health at the time of his graduation, and he writes Morrow: “My health is no better than when I left. My cough doesn’t get much better. I have taken a whole bottle of medicine since I have been here.” Hardly had he reached his home when his neighbors arranged for a speech from the neighborhood prodigy, and the young lawyer, having prepared it with a care becoming the importance of the occasion, went out into the woods near by, where he was practicing it with much vigor of gesticulation and expenditure of lung power when a neighborhood girl, passing the outskirts of the wood on her way to the house “with the two front doors,” saw him without recognizing either the man or the occasion. Rushing breathessly into the Kern home, she explained that she had encountered “a crazy man” in the woods making all sorts of unearthly noises. “Oh, he’s not crazy,” said Sally Kern smiling, “that’s only John practicing his speech.” A little later the shingle of “John W. Kern--Attorney at Law” was hung at Kokomo. CHAPTER II KOKOMO DAYS--LAWYER AND CITIZEN I As we have seen it was Kern’s intention at one time to begin the practice of his profession in Iowa--a plan that was abandoned when the state went overwhelmingly for the “radical program.” Before leaving Ann Arbor we have noted his plan to establish an office at Tipton, Indiana. The process of reasoning which soon eliminated Tipton from consideration and led to his opening an office in the county seat of his native county about the first of May, 1869, when he fell seven months short of his twentieth birthday, is set forth in the following letter to Morrow, then at Ann Arbor: