After I was grown I was grown. I went to work for Al Tennison. He put me to work behind a plow cultivator and a big team of horses. The cultivator was the same one my dad had bought from the salesman.

AT THE RACES

  I remember an old gray horse my Dad traded for. The horse was tall and poor. One day my second oldest brother, Willie, told me to return a set of hay forks to our neighbor, Mr. Goins. On the way to the Goins farm, I had to go through a race track. My brother told me to be sure not to run the horse around the track. Naturally, when I had delivered the hay forks, my first thought was to see how that I could put the old horse around the track. I cut a switch from a sapling and stood high in my saddle to see if I could see Willie near the track. The coast looked clear and I said, "let 'er go" to the horse. When I got to the finish line Willie was waiting for me. He cut himself a switch and gave me a lashing. That was my last race!

  I was very unhappy about Willie catching me at the race track. I had seen my older brothers take Pa's horses out from the plow and race them on the track when Pa was not around.

AROUND THE OLD FIREPLACE

  I remember that, as a boy, when I got hungry I always loved to watch Ma cook our meals on the old fireplace. That is where she cooked most of our meals especially during the winter months. We always had plenty of good things to cook. There were fat hogs and beef to butcher, also lots of wild game such as quail, squirrel, raccoon, opossum, wild turkey, and deer.

  When I was a boy, we mostly used grease lamps. Ma would bake a suet cloth and plat it into a wick, then she would fill a dish or pan with hog grease or tallow so that the grease would barely cover the platted wick. The light was so poor you almost had to light a