price, and beat him down to the lowest penny. For, strange as it might sound, this inclines the farmer to trust you. You see, his mind figures it out something like this:

"That there drover is anxious to get a bottom figure, because he's good pay, and means, when the time comes, to settle up promptly and penny for penny. He wants to get a good contract because he is the kind of a fellow to live up to it word for word. To be sure, he is a tight fellow to deal with, but at least he is a safe fellow, and so I guess I'll let him have this pair of cattle on credit." In these ways, working now one plan and now another, got together a nice little sum of money.

I

It was about this time that the field of business for drovers was widened to take in the great Mohawk valley. The city on Manhattan Island was growing so fast that our little section up in the Harlem valley couldn't raise cattle fast enough to supply her butchers. So a new region now was tapped, the country to the north, across the Hudson. For some time back I had been on the look-out for a

new place to move to. Change of pasture makes fat steers; and it's sometimes good for a business man, too. So I got to going on trips "out West," as we called it. I would ride up north and cross over into the region around Cherry Valley (that is where the massacre in the Revolutionary War by those red savages took place). There I would get

a drove of cattle and start with them back towards New York City. We had regular routes which we followed with our droves. The taking of live stock overland to the New York market had got to be an established business by this time, with regular stopping places. There were tavern-keepers here and there along the route who catered to drovers. They would have a big pasture lot alongside the tavern, divided into two or three pastures to take care of several herds at once. When, hot and sore at the end of a day's drive, I reached one of these taverns, the inn-keeper would be there with his "Hello, Dan! I thought you'd be coming along about this time. Been expecting you these two weeks or more. Put your critters out in the orchard lot. The pasture there is as fine as a fiddle just now; and come in and rest your bones. Boy, take his horse."

From Cherry Valley we would strike across and into the old Schoharie Valley. This we would follow until we got to Middleburgh, an old Dutch settlement. We hired sloughters here to drive the cattle (in that locality they call a low, worthless fellow a "sloughter"). There we would put up for the night at a tavern called "The Bull's Head." I mention this tavern in particular, because of another "Bull's Head Inn" which I will tell you about later on. This "Bull's Head" at Middleburgh got its name from a big bull's head that was painted on a shed opposite the tavern, on the other

V

T WAS about this time in my life that I got to an estimable young lady in

married

my home county. For, though my drover trips were now taking me far afield, I didn't cut loose from Putnam County altogether. Winter time would find me back home. You can't drive

cattle in the winter time. The hard roads and sharp ice would make them hoof-sore very quick. For drovers, winter time is rest time. (For that matter midsummer is also a bad time for the drover business, because in very hot weather a drove of cattle would sweat pounds of good fat off their flanks before you'd get them across even one county.) For drovers springtime and fall are the favourable seasons. So every winter would find me back in Carmel, doing what I could at odd jobs to earn my board, until the roads thawed out again in the spring.

Winter was the time for society affairs in Carmel. I never was much of a hand for society, being more fitted to size up a critter and buy him at a good figure than I was to make much of a shine in social circles. Still, I knew how to spark the girls. Of a winter's

night at Carmel we used to have high old times at sleigh rides and the mite societies. Then there were the paring-bees-we used to call them "applecuts" and the singing school, nut-cracking parties, candy-pulls- what not? I was ratherish slow at getting started off to one of these shindigs. But once there and into the thick of it, I could carry my part with any of them. There was an applecut one night that I remember as well as I do my own name. We were playing the game "Wink and follow." After a while my turn came to be It. I caught one of the girls and said: "Laura, now I've got you." She looked me straight in the eyes and said: "Dan, you're not going to kiss me unless you're stronger than I be. And I know you be." I was. When it would come time for the refreshments, I used to step forward and help pass the fried cake, new cider, apples and hickory nuts, fine as anything.

Well, as I started to say, I got married. It was more or less this way. My brother Tom, two years before, had married one of the Mead girls, who lived over on Turk's Hill (just below where Seth Howe built his fine home with those imitation animals I think I've wrote about it further back). Their father was a farm labourer. This Abigail Mead, my brother's wife, had a sister who was younger, just as I was younger than my brother Tom. Her name was Roxana Roxana Mead,

(That's where the name "Mead Hall," at Drew Theological Seminary, comes from. That's my wife's picture in the Hall. But I'm getting ahead of my story.) What more natural, than that I and Roxana should get acquainted. When your brother has got a wife, and that wife has got a sister, there are going to be no end of chances for you and that sister to get to know each other. And, to make a long story short, we up and married. She was tall. So was I. Folks said we made a fine-looking pair as we stood side by side to be yoked together by the preacher.

I am sorry to say that I had lost my religion during these drover days. It's hard, anyhow, for a cattle dealer to keep religion. He is away from home too much. During these days I was always on_the_go-never was one of your lazy-bones; better to wear out shoes than sheets, was my motto. And when you're away from home you get sort of careless-like. You haven't got your own people around to kind of keep you straightened up. More than that, it is hard to keep religion when you haven't any one church to go to. In these days I was scurrying from pillar to post, sleeping outdoors or in barns, farmhouses, strange taverns — where not? And the upshot was, I by and by drifted from the means of grace. I back

slided.

But I didn't slip back so far as to be unmindful