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and Sunday. Maurice was known to be rounder, a woman's man in other words. So he'd ask my father if he could take me to the picture show, so my dad always seemed to trust him so he'd let me go. So Maurice would hire a taxi and we'd take in the show. The next time I'd be there he'd get a taxi and we'd ride all over Bay St. Louis and Waveland and Lord knows where else. In all the times we were together he was a perfect gentleman. I don't know if he was afraid of my father or if he knew I'd put him in his place if he got out of it. We corresponded for awhile. Then one Sunday afternoon,
I almost got my self in trouble, he had just left when Willie drove up so that's the first thing he asked me was who was that fellow I just met? I said well; how am I supposed to know? You see our house was on one side and a big field was on the other side and the road ran right between the field and the house. A wide lane. People were coming and going all the time. A man by the name of Freeman had a barroom on the other side of the Pearl River at Gainesville and you had to cross the river by boat to get to it. White and black were always coming and going by our place because that was the major highway at that time. This was when I was real young but then later when I was around the age of sixteen they started building the main highway over across on the other side of our field. One day my father said, daughter, they are putting a wonderful road through these parts and you may live to enjoy riding on them but your old dad, I'm afraid, won't be around by then. Which he wasn't has had Bright's disease and heart trouble then. But neither of those diseases killed him. He had locked bowels and if they had known then how to operate they could have saved him. He was staying with sister Emma sometime after I married, that is when he got sick so she was not a trained nurse but almost as good as one. She and her children nursed and cared for him for quite some time so at Christmas he decided he'd go spend Christmas with his other daughter, Stella & Emile, so Jahue hitched young Dandy to the buggy and helped him into the buggy, then wrapped the lap rope around him good as it was real cold, he told them all goodbye as if he would never see them again which some of them he never. Anyway Christmas morning my daddy asked Emile if he'd let Rasmus, his oldest son, go to Napoleon and bring Pearl down to have dinner with him because he said it may be my last Christmas as with you folks. So Rasmus came after me in the double surrey, which I'm sure you young folks have seen on T.V. It was sprinkling rain that A.M. when Rasmus came after me and when I told my mother-in-law I was going to eat dinner with
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