No cooling breeze to alleviate the pain on a youthful face or the faces of those careworn early pioneers who blazed the way for future generations, who would erect homes, till the soil, plant trees, and endeavor to further promote civilization, until succeeding generations would reap the pleasure and peace that was purchased through these sacrifices and hardships of their forefathers. We owe to the pioneers such a vast debt of gratitude that we never can pay the the principal with no interest attached, and it’s a different kind of interest than four per cent a month. After I had grown to manhood and my lot had been cast in other places it was over fourteen years before I saw much of the old scenes, but when returning to the old places I noticed great changes. The town had grown; few of the old places were left and the old haunts and nooks were hard to find. A dreary and quiet sadness steals over one when looking at his boyhood and manhood earliest recollections, and as I glanced at the old scenes I stood and looked longingly, earnestly and lovingly at the old familiar places. There was the locust grove I helped to plant two decades ago; there was the little stream after which the town was named: there was the old pump which so many times quenched my thirst; there was the exact spot where dearie said the joyful word; there was the old house where our first baby was born; there was the farm patch I used to plow, and the meadow where I pitched the hay. All seemed different and as the pathos of the change surged in my breast I walked away longing for something I couldn’t get, and would never get again. GETTING THE BACKBONE. About the year 1889 when I was seventeen years old I commenced on the lowest rung on the railroad ladder and went to work on the section. I was frail physically, and must have been the same mentally, for I never got beyond the third rung. I worked in the days when you spoke for the spring job the preceding fall, and then often your application met failure. In hard times when jobs are few the fellow that has them is blessed with unusual longevity, and whenever some one did pass beyond, his demise was railroad talk for a long time. When you consider that all through the central west, which had a few years earlier been homesteaded after several repeated crop failures, almost the entire population were looking for employment and the only cash job in the country was a section job, you can realize how desirable and prized a position it was. I don’t remember how it came that my application was slumbering all through the cold winter with a large number of those half-starved homesteaders who hadn’t raised anything for so many years, received recognition in the spring; but it did and I got one of the plums.