About this time I attended my first school and my teacher was my cousin, Arthur D. Hastings, Jr., who lived to a good old age, and died September 15th, 1906 within a little more than a stone's cast of where he taught. My first and only textbook at school for a year or more was Webster's blue back Spelling book. It had both Spelling and Reading in it. I learned all from end to end. The teacher said I ought to have a reader, so farther bought for me, McGuffey's second reader; as soon as I got hold of it I ran with it to the barn loft and sat down on the hay and read all that was in it before I got up. The next day the teacher said I ought to have a higher reader, so father bought for me McGuffey's fourth reader, the highest that was, and these two readers were all the readers that I ever read. Grammar was not so easy. My text-book was Smith's. I would start at the first of the book, and get about half through at the end of the term. This I did for a half dozen years or more. Finally when I started to high school I took up Clark's grammar and finished it. But, to go back a little, father after the great flood, went down to Texas and bought several hundred acres of land and came back and sold his farm intending to move to Texas, but changed his mind and sold his Texas land for a song in the shape of a beautiful colt. This colt grew into one of the prettiest and best horses your grandfather ever had. But remember it cost hundreds of acres of land which are worth thousands of dollars now. It was like paying too much for your whistle. If we had gone to Texas, boys, I do not know what might have been but I do know now that you are and that you have one of the best mothers that lives. Often have I heard her pray with tears in her eyes that you and all the boys might be saved from the use of tobacco and strong drink. Father next turned his attention towards securing a home in the pocket of the White River, which he did by buying a farm in Daviers County on the border of Clark's Prairie and adjoining the village of Clarksburg, which is now the city of Oden. At the time of our removal to Clarksburg I was about nine years old. We liked our new home. At this time Daviers County was a wilderness of brush, trees and swamps, with plenty of wild game,--deer, coons, opossums, squirrels, turkeys, ducks, quails, snowbirds, and of wild fruits, grapes, plums, crab-apples and strawberries. And of fish of all kinds, nearly. I never was much of a Nimrod. Many times I saw deer, and once when I had a gun upon my shoulder, but I did not take it off. Early one morning a flock of thirty or forty wild turkeys came within a rod or two of the kitchen window, but when we opened the door instead of coming in, they flew away. Some days after that I heard turkeys gobbling in the woods, and I took the gun and went where they were and shot one dead. Happened to hit it in the head. Once I shot a crow and killed it.