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.”
W. T.
Osakis, Minn., Nov. 29, 1893.