uated as one of its first class of nine, of whom six remain in Story county and five in or very near to Nevada. In the next year he clerked a few months in a justice's office and completed his preparation for college. In the fall of 1878 he entered the State University of Iowa at Iowa City, where be it recorded that he was an active member of the Zetagathian Literary Society. Four years were spent in college in due course and he graduated in the class of 1882. Returning to the university for another year, he took his degree in law in 1883 and was admitted to the bar but never entered the active practice. Instead he returned to Nevada and became associated with his father and mother in the publication of the Nevada Representative. Always interested in public affairs, he has been a quite voluminous writer of political editorials, many of which have been more or less extensively quoted. He has held the local offices of justice of the peace and member of the city council, has attended very many political conventions and has gained a considerable acquaintance in the state. He was a delegate in 1900 to the republican national convention at Philadelphia which nominated McKinley and Roosevelt and has been frequently mentioned in connection with the republican nomination for congress in the seventh district of Iowa. He was assistant clerk of the general assembly in 1888 and two years later was clerk of the committee on coinage, weights and measures of the house of representatives through the famous fifty-first congress. He has been for nearly thirty years on the Nevada Representative, is now fifty years of age and hopes that his best work is yet before him.
He was married in Madison county, Iowa, December 15, 1886, to Miss Jessie Dickens. They have one daughter, Jessie Bancroft Payne, who graduated from the Nevada high school in 1905 and from the State University of Iowa in 1910.
JESSIE DICKENS PAYNE.
Jessie Dickens Payne, wife of William O. Payne, was the daughter of William and Maria Ellen Dickens and was born at Linwood, Minnesota, June 22, 1861. Her mother died while she was small and her father removed from his farm to the neighboring town of Anoka. In 1869 the family removed to Aurora, Illinois, and in 1875 to Winterset, Iowa. After two years at Winterset, the father's business having been burned out, the family removed to Kansas; but she and her older sister, Ella, remained in Iowa and made their home with an uncle and aunt, Mr. and Mrs. Andrew Downing of Boone. She attended the Boone high school and also spent a year at Mt. Carroll Seminary at Mt. Carroll, Illinois. She taught country schools in Story, Polk and Madison counties, her first school being the poor farm school in this county. Later she accompanied the Downings to St. Jos-