Music was our greatest pleasure and we never tired of it. "Uncle John," as everyone called him, the old teacher, never tired teaching the children music, and so it soon came about they could read their music as readily as they could their school books. No Christmas ever went by without a Christmas tree, in which the whole neighborhood joined, or a Fourth of July passed without a celebration. We made the presents for the tree if we could not buy them, and supplied the musicians, reader and orator for the celebration. Everybody had something to do and a voice in saying what should be done, and that very fact made all happy.
We had sixteen miles to go to our market town, Steilacoom, over the roughest kind of a road. Nobody had horse teams at the start, and so we had to go with ox teams. We could not make the trip out and back in one day, and did not have money to pay hotel bills, and so we would drive out part of the way and camp and the next morning drive into town very early, do our trading, and, if possible, reach home the same day. If not able to do this, we camped again on the road; but if the night was not too dark would reach home in the night. And oh! what an appetite we would have, and how cheery the fire would be, and how welcome the reception in the cabin home.
One of the "youngsters," sixty years old now, after reading "The Morning School," writes:
"Yes, father, your story of the morning school is just as it was. I can see in my mind's eye yet us children reciting and standing up in a row to spell, and Auntie and mother getting breakfast, and can remember the little bed room; of rising early and of reading 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' as a dessert to the work."
Near where the old log cabin schoolhouse stood our high school building now stands, large enough to accommodate four hundred pupils. In the district where we could count nineteen children of school age, with eleven in attendance, now we have twelve hundred boys and girls of school age, three large schoolhouses and seventeen teachers.
The trees and stumps are all gone and brick buildings and other good houses occupy much of the land, and as many people now live in that school district as lived both east and west of the mountains when the Territory was created in March, 1853. Instead of ox teams, and some at that with sleds, the people have buggies and carriages, or automobiles, or they can travel on any of the eighteen passenger trains that pass daily through Puyallup, or on street cars to Tacoma, and also on some of the twenty to twenty-four freight trains, some of which are a third of a mile long. Such are some of the changes wrought in fifty years since pioneer life began in the Puyallup Valley.
Now, just try your hand on this song that follows, one that our dear old teacher has sung so often for us, in company with one of those scholars of the old log cabin, Mrs. Frances Bean, now of Tacoma, who has kindly supplied the words and music:
FIFTY YEARS AGO.
How wondrous are the changes
Since fifty years ago,