Lockwood, N. Y.
Look Before You Leap.
This is the leisure season, and people gather around the warm stove
to “cuss” and discuss the merits and demerits of different sections
of our great country, some favoring one State and some another, some
favoring South, some East and West--any place but cold Minnesota. I
spoke of Texas. One of our townsmen spoke in regard to Texas, something
after this style: You don’t know what you (as a Northerner) are talking
about. Just after the War closed, there were eleven families that left
Osakis for Sherman, Tex., and all came back that could. I tell you
a person from the North has no business down there. I left here in
January, and got back in June, and I have located on a farm here for
life.
The cemetery at Sherman has three little graves marking the
resting-place of our three little children, all being taken from us
in three weeks. My wife being sick, she thought it advisable to go
North again; she barely survived to get back, but soon recovered, and
three more children blessed our home, which are with us, plump and
healthy; while children in the extreme South resemble calves reared on
“skim-milk.”