As we lived near the road, people usually stopped at our house, either for a drink of fresh spring-water (a scarcity in those days), or to purchase milk, butter, garden-stuff, or anything that we could spare. These were the pioneers of Wisconsin, and were mostly from Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and Michigan. They were the second generation of pioneers of their native States. In asking where they were from we generally asked, "What are you?" If from New York, it was "Empire State"; if from Pennsylvania, "Keystones"; if from Ohio, "Buckeyes." Many more Illinois pioneers moved on to Wisconsin in those days than remained, owing to the dread of fever and ague. In this endless train of "movers" it was not uncommon for my mother to meet people whose families she had known in western New York. THE LAND-LOOKER. The land-looker was as much an occupant of the road as the emigrant. He was the advance-picket who had preceded on foot every family that passed, and had located his quarter-section, built his preëmption shanty, and inhabited it three days, which allowed him to hold it one year, while he could return for his family. These men were passing daily, winter and summer, and the tavern near us was crowded nightly with them and with emigrants. Our house, too, was a shelter for many. Father saw the enterprising home-seekers daily, and heard the accounts of those who were returning from their prospective homes after having located; and their glowing descriptions of the country, the climate, and its freedom from ague, gave him the "Wisconsin fever." Mother, however, looked distrustfully on the favorable reports brought back daily, and she pitied the people moving north. Father had provided a fair living for his large family--sumptuous, indeed, compared with that of our first year in the West. We had friends and neighbors and schools. The owner of the farm wished my father to hire it for two years more, but father would argue that this was his chance to get a home, and here was an opportunity for his boys; he could make nothing on rented land, and he had only been able to keep his family alive for three years. Mother said: "Supposing we do preëmpt, it is only for a year or two, and then the land must be entered and paid for at one dollar and twenty-five cents an acre. Where is the money coming from?" Father told her that many of the emigrants who had no money got friends or speculators to furnish it for half the land. Mother was not enthusiastic, but she finally consented to go if father could get his sister in Connecticut to enter the land for him when due, and to hold it in her name until father could, at some future time, pay for it. My aunt consented to this, and in February there came a letter from her inclosing a draft for one hundred dollars, with which to buy a yoke of oxen and a wagon with which to work the farm. So my father was fitted out as a land-looker, and mother worked all day and all night to make his knapsack.