He was a contented personage in his early married life. His wife, while not a shrew, had undoubted force of character, but there was not much attrition; and his little daughter was, in John's estimation, the fairest child upon the continent. Personally, he was content with all the world, though his wife was somewhat less so. John had his failings. He was not counted among the farmers of the neighborhood as a "pushing" man. There was still much woodland in Macomb County in the year 1857, and in autumn the woods were most enticing. Squirrels, black and gray, were still abundant where the oak and hickory were; the ruffled grouse still fed in families upon beech-nuts on the ridges and the thorn-apples of the lowlands. The wild turkey still strutted about in flocks rapidly thinning, and occasionally a deer fell to the lot of the shrewd hunter. John liked to hunt and fish. He wasted time that way, his neighbors said, and his wife was of the same opinion. It is true, he possessed certain qualities which, even in their utilitarian eyes, commanded some slight respect. He was so close to nature in his thoughts and fancies that he knew many things which they did not, and which had a money value. It was he, for instance, who first recognized the superior quality of the White Neshannock, the potato of the time. It was he who grafted the Baldwin upon his apple-trees, recognizing the fact that this particular apple was a toothsome and marketable and relatively non-decaying fruit. And it was he who could judge best as to what crosses and combinations would most improve the breed of horses and cattle and hogs and sheep. They admitted his "faculty," as they called it, in certain directions, but they had a profound contempt for him in others. They could not understand why he would leave standing in the midst of a wheat-field a magnificent soft maple, the branches of which shaded and made untillable an area of scores of yards. They could not understand why he hesitated to murder a tree. So it came that he was with them while scarcely of them, and that Mrs. Appleman, who could not comprehend, belonged to the majority.