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started and got a little ways when Volney discovered he had forgotten his cap and Loyal said, yes, and I never got but one sip of my molasses, so with that they went back to the house to get Volney's cap. Mr. Carver lived nearly a half a mile from there. This was in the summer when it was real dry weather, so the old home wasn't long going to the ground. It was the same as a funeral for all of the Daniels family. It had been our home for thirty some odd years. We had some hard times, sad times and good times.
When I was sixteen, I had five boy friends all at the same time. None of them were allowed to take me out, so my father always sat in his bedroom reading and I'd entertain them in the living room next to his bedroom or we'd go in the kitchen and make molasses candy or sit around the dining room table and talk and those days the young callers as my father used to call them knew to leave at strictly nine o'clock, because if they didn't he'd call bedtime. He was very strict with me but now I can look back and realize how to appreciate him for it. I can say with an honest heart that I never did anything to be ashamed of, but I know now that the Lord and his Angles were watching over me.
I was a big tom boy as ever lived, I could climb a ladder twenty four feet high and turn somersaults, could climb any tree that any boy could climb, dig a bunch of worms and go way down in a branch and fish for hours with moccasins coming up on the bank to get my fish so I'd kill all I could and the rest I'd scare away. Wasn't afraid any more than I am sitting here writing.
Some times I'd take brother Jays rabbit dog and the axe and go way over in the swamp on the other side of a large hill beyond our house and old Ring would have a rabbit bayed in a hollow log so I'd chop a hole in the log where Ring was smelling and there he'd be, so when I chopped the hole big enough old Ring would reach in there and pull him out. Then Jay would always clean and either fry or bake it. I used to love rabbit, but after I married and went to Mrs. Hovers, she turned me against it by saying she used to like rabbit as good as anything, but she said it got so when she'd chew a piece for a minute she'd have to spit it out as it got bigger & bigger the longer she chewed it; so then that was they way it was with me. But since I'm ninety years young,
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