At the time I disposed of the mercantile business, I was postmaster at Urbana, which position I retained, and removed the Post Office to a small building owned by Mr. S. H. Burris. Soon after making the exchange of our residence property in Urbana for Polk County land, we removed to the farm east of Urbana, where Father and Mother lived for many years, and which they had deeded to me several years before their deaths, but upon which they retained a life time lease, and they received the proceeds, or rent, there from as long as they lived.

After we had been living on the farm same time and while I was still postmaster at Urbana, I think it was in the fall of 1889 or spring of 1890, my sister and her oldest daughter, Nelle, visited us. We were delighted to see them, though very sorry to find that Nelle was in very poor healtn. They stayed with us two or more weeks and during that time Nelle‘s health improved very much. While we were very glad to have had them with us, we regretted very much to have to part with them when they returned to their home in Pana, Illinois. We heard from them frequently after their arrival at home and were glad to know that Nelle was still improving and that she finally regained her heaith. She was a very intelligent and well educated girl, and subsequently we corresponded for years and she was an excellent correspondent..

After we moved from Urbana to the farm I planned to make some improvements and I continued to employ Reuben Green, who had worked for me while we resided in town. He repaired the fences and cleared and put in cultivation two or three acres of new ground lying north of the orchard and made other needed improvements. The farm had been rented for several years and needed careful attention and much work to put it in good condition again, and in order to give more personal supervision to the work on the farm, sometime during the Spring of 1890 I resigned my position as postmaster at Urbana. Then in addition to superintending the farm labor I began the study of law and read Blackstone very closely that year. We raised a fairly good crop of grain and vegetables that year, had a considerable flock of poultry which produced plenty of chicken and eggs for our use and some to sell, and from two good milk cows we had a sufficiency of milk and butter. I was a Notary Public, a position I had held for several years, and did some fire insurance business which added some to our income.

The year 1890 passed until in the winter without any of us being ill.. Then I had quite a severe attack of gastritis from which I suffered intensely for several weeks. I took treatment for the disease from Dr. John P. Andrews who was still practictng medicine in our locality and eventually I regained my health.

Early in the year 1891 our third daughter was born on January 25 whom we named Nelle Lenore, the first name for cousin Nelle Price and Lenora for Aunt Laura, whose second name is Lenora. She was a dark haired, brown eyed and very pretty little baby and during the first five or six months of her child life, she was excessively fleshy. She had an exceptionally good disposition, giving her mother very little trouble in caring for her. Her uncle Dolph, after Nelle was five or six years old, said she was the best child he ever saw. She well deserved what they said of her.

During the summer and fall of 1891, James Slavens, Brother Bud’s oldest son, assisted me with the work on the farm, and was an exceptionally good boy to work, very careful and absolutely trustworthy. I still continued the study of law during the spring and summer of that year and in company with Messrs. J. W. Montgomery and Ezra Carter, also law students, I spent several weeks in Buffalo in the law office of Attorney O. H. Scott who was our legal instructor. In addition to the further study of Blackstone we read works on real estate, contracts and criminal law. Attorney Scott was a very able lawyer and his instruction was of great benefit to us, and he did us much good in preparing us for an examination for admission to the bar. After the crop season was over that year during which we had raised and had threshed a crop of flax, I, accompanied by Jim, as we always called him, and our son Joe took a load of the flaxseed to Bolivar and sold it, realizing a very fair price far it. That fall, I taught a term of school at Olive Point Schoolhouse near the home of Josie’s parents in Hickory County but I still pursued my law studies during leisure hours from school duties. That fall our law instructor informed us that had made sufficient proficiency in our studies in his opinion to pass an examination for admission to the bar. Accordingly Messrs. Montgomery, Carter and I appeared before Judge W. I. Wallace in the Circuit Court of Hickory County, at the fall term, 1891 and after, we thought, a very rigid examination were granted authority to practice law in the courts of the state of Missouri. An attorney’s license was issued to each of us and after considering the question of a location, Mr. Montgomery and I decided to locate at Hermitage, and Mr. Carter chose Linn Creek in Camden County. The next spring Mr. Montgomery and I built a small office in Hermitage where, a little later, we began the practice of law.

In the meantime having finished my tern of school at Olive Point in Hickory County, which was one of the best and most successful terms of schools I ever taught, the pupils, many of whom were nearly grown, having made excellent progress in their studies, we continued to reside on the farm during the winter of 1891-1892. We were all well, until after Christmas. Then during about the coldest weather of the season, all of our children contracted scarlet fever. We did not know that they had been exposed to this very dangerous disease, but Dr. Andrews, who attended them during their illness diagnosed it as scarlet fever. They all made a fairly quick recovery except Nelle whose throat was seriously affected by the disease and she was in very feeble health for a long time, and in fact, never did recover fully but eventually became some healthier. During the time the children were ill, they all had very high fevers and the doctor in order to ascertain their temperature used a fever thermometer, which is a glass tube in which there is mercury. He had the patient, all except Nelle, to take the thermometer in the mouth and retain it, the end or bulb, under the tongue, a few minutes until the patient’s temperature would be shown by the rise of the mercury in the thermometer. All went well until he attempted to take Inez ‘s temperature, who then was about three years old. When the thermometer was put in her mouth, she became frightened and bit off the end of the glass instrument. Her mother, who was holding her, immediately turned her with her face toward the floor and the glass she bit off fell to the floor. Fearing though that she might have swallowed some particles of glass, the doctor gave Inez an emetic and emptied her stomach of its contents. No serious result followed the very unusual accident and the doctor ascertained Inez’s and Nelle ‘s temperature by putting the instrument in the pit of their arms and from the time the thermometer incident occurred they all began to improve.

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