Mr. Wisner looked at us
sharply as we came in, and shook hands first with Bill and then with me.
"Glad to see you again," said he heartily. "Glad to see you again! I
want to tell you some more about Wisconsin. I haven't told you the half
of its advantages."
I saw that he thought we had been there before, and was about to correct
his mistake, when Bill told him that that's what we had come for.
"What you said about Wisconsin," said Bill, winking at me, "has sort of
got us all worked up."
"Is it a good country for a boy to locate in?" I asked.
"A paradise for a boy!" he said, in a kind of bubbly way. "And for a
poor man, it's heaven! Plenty of work. Good wages. If you want a home,
it's the only God's country. What kind of land have you been farming in
the past?"
Bill said that he had spent his life plowing the seas, but that all the
fault I had was being a landsman. I admitted that I had farmed some
near Herkimer.
"And," sneered Mr. Wisner crushingly, "how long does it take a man to
clear and grub out and subdue enough land in Herkimer County to make a
living on? Ten years! Twenty years! Thirty years! Why, in Herkimer
County a young man doesn't buy anything when he takes up land: he sells
something! He sells himself to slavery for life to the stumps and
sprouts and stones! But in Wisconsin you can locate on prairie land
ready for the plow; or you can have timber land, or both kinds, or
opening's that are not quite woods nor quite prairie--there's every kind
of land there except poor land! It's a paradise, and land's cheap.
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