One day, as we were returning from school we espied a squirrel that had taken refuge in a small tree by the roadside. Cordelia laid her work-pocket at the roots of the tree, and she and my sister mounted the fence, and commenced to climb the tree to catch it. Discovering the work-pocket, I picked it up unperceived, and started on. Coming to a bank of loose earth, where a tree had been recently uprooted by the wind, I buried it, and then returned toward my companions and called to them to come along. The girls had started to overtake me, when Cordelia, missing her work-pocket, returned to get it. She searched for it a long time, but without success. Failing to find it, she accused me of getting it, which I stoutly denied. At last, complaint was made to my father. Both of the girls had seen it lying near the tree, but neither of them had seen me have it. My father asked me what I had done with it; but I denied having seen it. "You _must_ have taken it," said the old man, "for nobody else was there that could have taken it." "I _must_ have got the nails too," I replied. This outflanked him; he remembered having whipped me once wrongfully, and feared a repetition of the same thing. The result was I evaded punishment, and my father never found out what I had done with the work-pocket. The next summer, after my father's death, I hired out on board of one of the packet-boats running on the Ohio Canal, as cabin-boy. I continued for three summers to follow the canal in that capacity, and for four summers following I was a canal driver. The last three seasons I drove the same team, and at the end of the third season I received from the Transportation Company a prize of ten dollars for having kept my team in the best order. The winter following, my seventh season on the canal, I went down the Mississippi River to Arkansas, and spent the season chopping steamboat wood. While thus employed on Island Twenty-eight, I had the fortune to kill a very large black bear, which I sold to a steamboat captain for what seemed to me at that time a great price. The incident turned my attention to trapping and bear-hunting. I spent several successive winters in hunting and trapping in the wilds of Arkansas. In the winter of 1851 and 1852 I was employed in hunting wild hogs in the Yazoo bottoms for a man in Vicksburg, Miss. I was thus engaged at the same time that the fourteen French hunters were killed by wild hogs in the Yazoo bottoms. I spent one year as an overseer for Mr. James Ford, of Memphis, Tenn., on the French palace plantation, near the fort of Island No. 60. My summers were usually spent on the Mississippi and its tributaries. In the summer of 1859 I went to Pike's Peak, and thence to Salt Lake. The winter of 1860 and 1861 I was at work on White River, Ark., and had several hands at work with me, filling a contract for shingles for a man by the name of Hanner, in Bolivar County, Mississippi.