The memoirs of an American citizen Author:Robert Herrick Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III JASOXVILLE, INDIANA The Harringtons The village magnate A young hoodlum On the road to school The first woman Disgrace, and a girl's ... more »will An unfortunate coincidence In trouble againMay loses faith The end of Jaso in'ille Discharged A loan Charity The positive young lady hopes I shall start right The lake front once more I preach myself a good sermon The Harringtons were pretty well known in Greene County, Indiana. Father moved to Jasonville just after the war, when the place was not much more than a crossroads with a prospect of a railroad sometime. Ours was the first brick house, built after the kind he and mother used to know back in York Skate. And he set up the largest general store in that district and made money. Then he lost most of it when the oil boom first came. Mother and he set great store by education, if father hadn't gone to the war he wouldn't have been keeping a country store, and they helped start the first township high school in our part of the state. And he sent Will, my older brother, and me to the Methodist school at Eureka, which was the best he could do for us. There wasn't much learning to be had in Eureka " College," however; the two or three old preachers and women who composed, the faculty were too busy trying to keep theboys from playing cards and smoking or chewing to teach us much. Perhaps I was a bit of a hoodlum as a boy, anyway. The trouble started with the judge Judge Sorrell. He was a local light, who held a mortgage on 'most everything in town (including our store after father went into oil). We boys had always heard at home how hard and mean the judge was, and dishonest, too; for in some of the oil deals he had tricked folks out of their property. It wasn't so strange, then, that w...« less