SIXTY years ago we was plowing with a yoke of steers in a field that lay idle the year before, and we was barefoot, and there was a great many dead weeds in the field. We was plowing along, interrupting nobody, and we felt something tight around the foot, and we thought it was a forked or crooked weed, and we kicked, and instead of its coming off it rather seemed to get tighter, and we looked down and saw it was about a second-sized snake wrapped around our foot; and you ought to have seen him go, when we kicked the next time. We kicked with the spirit and with the understanding, when we saw what it was. It was not doing much harm, but we did not want it there. The Wild Cats. IT WAS probably in 1837, my Mother went to see a sick woman, and stayed there until dark, but the moon rose soon after dark, and she started home, she had a pretty good road through the thick woods for about a mile, and when nearly half way home three animals crossed the road just a little ahead of her, and she thought they were panthers, and when they got across the road they stopped, and she thought the bravest way was the safest, and she gathered up a big dead limb and made at them and hollered; they ran up a big oak tree near the road, and she stood there and hollered until John Hall heard and answered, and she told him for him and the boys to fetch their guns and dogs and come quick, she had three panthers treed, and he told her to stay there and keep up all the noise she could, and they run and shot them, and they proved to be wildcats; John said one of them was the largest wildcat he ever saw. That stick was kept about the house for years and was known as “Mamma’s Wildcat Club.” The Winters. IN OUR boyhood we had cold winters, but they were not quite so long as now, we had very deep snows and sometimes there would come a sleet on top of the snow; and then if we could find a deer on the prairie, and sometimes they would stay in the valleys; and if we would get the dogs after them when they would break through the ice and the dogs could run on top, they would soon catch it. At one time the Baptist people held their association near my Father’s, and Jack Neal, Cornelius May and Andrew Hanson started on horseback from their homes North of Tower Hill, and in riding through the prairie where Tower Hill now stands they scared up a yearling deer, and run it on their horses and caught it and brought it to my father’s and dressed it, and it was fat and we had fresh venison through the meeting. How the Pioneers Made Meal.