As for myself I walked and rode erect and felt my limbs as light as feathers, as compared with their leaden weight when I lived at Tempe and worked in the factory. Soon I took on my share of the fighting as a matter of course. I did it as a rule without anger and found that beyond a bloody nose or a scratched face, these fights did not amount to much. I was small for my age, and like most runts I was stronger than I looked, and gave many a driver boy a bad surprise. I never was whipped, though I was pummeled severely at times. When the fight grew warm enough I began to see red, and to cry like a baby, boring in and clinching in a mad sort of way; and these young roughs knew that a boy who fought and cried at the same time had to be killed before he would say enough. So I never said enough; and in my second year I found I had quite a reputation as a fighter--but I never got any joy out of it. If I could have forgotten my wish to see my mother it would have been in many ways a pleasant life to me. I was never tired of the new and strange things I saw--new regions, new countries. I was amazed at the Montezuma Marsh, with its queer trade of selling flags for chair seats and the like--and I was almost eaten alive by the mosquitoes while passing through it. Our boat floated along through the flags, the horses on a tow-path just wide enough to enable the teams to pass, with bog on one side and canal on the other, water birds whistling and calling, frogs croaking, and water-lilies dotting every open pool. My spirits soared as I passed spots where the view was not shut off by the reeds, and I could look out over the great expanse of flags, just as my heart rose when I first looked upon the Iowa prairies. The Fairport level gave me another thrill--an embankment a hundred feet high with the canal on the top of it, a part of a seventeen-mile level, like a river on a hilltop. We were a happy crew, here. Ace was quite recovered from our temporary difference of opinion--for I was treating him better than he expected. He used to sing merrily a song which was a real canal-chantey, one of the several I heard, the words of which ran like this: "Come, sailors, landsmen, one and all, And I'll sing you the dangers of the raging canawl; For I've been at the mercy of the winds and the waves, And I'm one of the merry fellows what expects a watery grave. "We left Albiany about the break of day; As near as I can remember, 'twas the second day of May; We depended on our driver, though he was very small, Although we knew the dangers of the raging canawl." The rest of it I forget; but I remember that after Bill had sung one of his chanties, like "Messmates hear a brother sailor sing the dangers of the seas," or, "We sailed from the Downs and fair Plymouth town," telling how