No sooner had shelter been provided for us, than we all turned to with hearty will to clear up a bit of land. My boys were a great help, and the oldest got to be very handy with the axe, which was well, for Braxton never got into the right hang of using it, and spent double the strength in doing the same work my boy did. There is quite an art in chopping. It was exhausting work clearing up the land, being quite new to us and the weather very hot. Often had Braxton to lay down his axe and bathe his head in the creek, but he never stopped, working from dawn to darkening, and when it was moonlight still longer. I helped to brush and log, as much to encourage my boys to work as for all I could do. When ready to burn, three neighbors came to show us how to do it and, the logs being large and full of sap, it was a slow and laborious job. The men looked like Blackamoors, being blacker than any sweeps, from smoke and the coom that rubbed off the logs, while the sweat just rolled down them, owing to the heat of the fires and the weather. We came on to our lot on the 29th of May and it was well on in June when the remains of the logs were handspiked out of the way and the ground was kind of clear between the stumps on half an acre. In the ashes we planted potatoes, and a week after, when a bit more land was taken in, we put in a few more. This done, we turned to make potash. Except along the creek there was no timber on our lot fit for making ashes but on its banks there was a fine cut of swale elm. The chopping of the trees was the easiest part of the work, the getting of the logs together and burning them being difficult, the underbrush being very thick and we so short of help in handling the felled trees. A neighbor showed us how to make a plan-heap and skid logs, but from inexperience we did not work to much advantage that summer. We, however, wrought with a will and kept at it, even my youngest, Ailie, helping by fetching water to drink. Young people nowadays have no idea of what work is, and I don’t suppose that one in twenty of them would go through what their fathers and mothers did. Although it was a dry summer, the banks of the creek were soft, so our feet were wet all the time and we had to raise the heaps on beds of logs to get them to burn. Our first lot of ashes we lost. Before they could be lifted into the leaches, a thunderstorm came on and in a few minutes the labor of a fortnight was spoiled. After that, we kept them covered with strips of bark.