By recess time she had again settled back in the old well beaten path and assumed her usual calm and dignified way, her reason, which had been so suddenly dethroned by the advent of the harmless mouse, was again gaining mastery of the situation. With the return of reason came the tangled threads of suspicion, that perhaps she had been the victim of a designing bunch of scholars and that a huge joke had been perpetrated on her. With this object in view she began a systematic search for evidence and among the girls she struck a responsive chord. They were ready to convict any one in order to exculpate themselves. They gave the whole plot away and every last one of them persisted in their innocence so eloquently that the teacher was fully convinced of my guilt. She therefore proceeded to relieve her pent up feelings by putting into action several of her "suffragette" ideas about personal liberty. She restrained me of mine for the next two weeks during the noon hour.
EARLY DOCTORS IN THE COUNTY
The following extracts from a paper read in December, 1910, before the Iowa Union Medical Society at its meeting in Cedar Rapids, by Dr. H. W. Sigworth, of Anamosa, himself a pioneer physician in Linn county, is of interest:
I left northeastern Linn county thirty-four years ago.
In 1856 I commenced the study of medicine in Pennsylvania. After that I was a tramp schoolmaster, farmer, student at Wisconsin university, and U. S. soldier. I graduated from Rush in '63. After looking for a location in Indiana, Illinois, and Wisconsin, I located at Waubeek—think of it—in Waubeek, in Maine township, in 1863.
I had tried it a month at Fairview, in Jones county, before going to Waubeek. By the way, old Dr. Ristine made his first start in Iowa in the same historic town of Fairview before locating in Marion.
Northeastern Linn county at that time was very much on the frontier. There were no bridges on the Wapsie from Quasqueton to Anamosa, but at Central City; now there are five. At Waubeek we had a postoffice but no regular mail carrier. Any one going to Marion took the mail sack and brought back the mail.
Our first mail route was on Friday morning. It left Quasqueton horseback, making Paris, Central City (which was formerly called Clark's Ford), Waubeek, Necot (Perkins), Anamosa. Saturday it would return over the same route.
The earliest doctor of whom I can get any word of locating in this territory was Doctor Ashby at Paris. When I came in 1863, Doctor Patterson was at Central City. Dr. Lanning was at Paris. He sat next to me at Rush in 1861 and 1862. Dr. Stacy lived out the Anamosa and Quasqueton road at Valley farm. I never met him. He sent me my first case of fractured thigh in June of 1863; a boy, eight years old, who lived in a sod house with a board roof, two miles north of McQueen's (now Hill's Mill), now owned by Coquillette. The splints were made with an axe and pocket knife out of an old cradle found on the roof of the house. Extension on the ankle was by the top of an old shoe with strings through the foot-piece of the Liston splint. Results all right.
At Paris, after Lanning came Drs. Byam, Mrs. Dr. Byam, and my brother, M. P. Sigworth, Fullerton, McTavish, and Ellis, all of whom I knew, and not one of them alive now.