And yet, after all, my brother, Gordon, and myself were not real neighborhood pets, for the two little sun-burned blondes were not as innocent as they looked. Aunt Becky Bragg, our second-door neighbor, was quoted as saying that Warren Richardson's two little whiteheaded urchins were the bane of her life, and all attempts to chide them seemed only to add fuel to the flames. We must have been useful about the farm, in teaching the chickens and cats to swim and the colts and steers to let us ride them, who occasionally dumped us where we least expected. One lively pastime was to tie a tin pan to one of the sleepy old cattle's tail, and watch him bound over the bushes to clear himself from what seemed to be following him. I can now see these great gentle creatures with half-closed eyes chewing their cuds, while father was around them, but when we appeared, they would stop chewing, bulge out their eyes and make ready to jump over the wall at our first gesture. Still we had our confiding pets, hens, lambs and even pigs. We had a curly-haired pig which would follow us around and lie down for us to scratch him, and as for dogs--why, old Major, the neighborhood tramp of suspicious character, stood in well with us and licked our hands and faces as we fed and gave him a warm shelter from the cold night. Father and mother understood it all, I know they did, but they realized how we would soon be out in the hand-to-hand conflict of life, and they wanted us to look back to our childhood mountain home with gladness and not pain. I was exceedingly stubborn and moderately truthful, so much so that one of the first remembrances of my life was that in some mysterious way I had acquired the nickname of Old Honesty. Oh, it did make me so mad to be called that, for I must have considered it a sort of defamation of character. THE WILD SEXTON STEER One day in the spring of 1855, when all the folks were away except Gordon and myself, we felt somewhat elated that we were running the farm on our own hook, so we conjured up a little fun. Our long barnyard opened with bars towards the house across the center to separate the cattle from the sheep. Here, just for sport, when no one was around, we would put up two or three bars and then chase the cattle, one by one, and see them jump over. We had a ferocious wild steer, we called Sexton, which would jump over almost anything to get away from us boys, so he was usually our victim for sport. Father was accustomed, each fall, to bring muck into the barnyard, which through the winter was covered with cornstalks, straw and manure from the stables, which the cattle would tread in during the rainy spring and mix it ready for the land. On this occasion it had been raining, and the mixture, soft as jelly, was about a foot deep, with the exception of a dry spot by the house bars.