Father went to Dearbornville and mortgaged his lot to Mrs. Phlihaven, a widow woman, for one hundred dollars, said to be at seven per cent., as that was lawful interest then. We supposed, at the time, he got a hundred dollars, but he got only eighty. Probably the reason he did not let us know the hard conditions of the mortgage, was because we opposed it so. Mrs. Phlihaven said as long as he would pay the twenty dollars shave money, and the seven dollars interest annually, she would let it run. And it did run until the shave money and interest more than ate up the principal. Father bought the oxen back for the old price, forty dollars, and bought another cow, of Mr. McVay, for which he paid eighteen dollars, leaving him twenty-two dollars of the hired money. It was now spring, the oxen became very poor, one of them was taken sick and got down. Father said he had the hollow horn and doctored him for that; but I think to day, if the oxen had had a little corn meal, and good hay through the winter, they would have been all right. After the ox got down, and we could not get him up he still ate and seemed to have a good appetite. I went to Dearbornville, bought hay at the tavern and paid at the rate of a dollar a hundred. I tied it up in a rope, carried it home on my back and fed it to him. Then I went into the woods, with some of the other children, and gathered small brakes that lay flat on the ground. They grew on beech and maple land, and kept green all winter. The ox ate some of them, but he died; our new cow, also, died in less than two weeks after father bought her. Then we had one ox, our old cow, and two young cattle we had raised from her, that we kept through the spring. In the summer the other ox had the bloody murrain and he died. Then we had no team, no money to get a team with, and our place was mortgaged. Now when father got anything for the family he had to bring it home himself. We got out of potatoes, these he bought at Dearbornville, paid a dollar a bushel for them, and brought them home on his back. He sent me to the village for meal. I called for it and the grocerman measured it to me in a quart measure which was little at the top, such as liquors are measured with. I carried the meal home. In this way we had to pack home everything we bought. When potatoes got ripe we had plenty of the best. On father's first visit to Michigan he was told that the soil of Michigan would not produce good potatoes. We soon found that this was a mistake for we had raised some good ones before, but not enough to last through the summer.