I remember one sunny afternoon, four or five of us boys were sitting up in the barn over the horse stalls eating peanuts. I was sitting on a board that was nailed to the underside of the ceiling joists. Well, the nails pulled out of the board and I fell to the ground and hit my head on a wooden block. The block proved to be tougher than my head. It cut a two-inch gash in my scalp above my right ear. Papa took me to our family doctor and had it sewed up. The story was told on us boys that, when we were all little, a mule kicked one of us in the head, and that boy was never quite normal after that. But then, as we grew older, we all got to acting so much alike that Mama and Papa couldn't tell which one of us the mule had kicked. Many years later, during the depression of the 1930s, a neighbor was giving me a homemade haircut one Sunday afternoon and, when he discovered the scar on my head, he laughed and said, "Now I know which one the mule kicked." Now let's get back to the story of when I was a boy on the Exum farm. I started to school when I was seven. In fact, most kids started at seven in those days. And since I was seven when school started in September, that meant I had been seven since last January 11th. In other words I was almost eight. While we lived at the Exum place, we went to school at Wise Chapel, which was about three miles northeast of our home. In winter we faced cold northers many mornings, and in the afternoons, we often faced strong southwesterly winds on our way home. As we walked to school, other pupils from other farms joined us, and then still others. By the time we arrived at school, there might be as many as 20 of us in one bunch. One of the families whose kids walked with us was the Bruner family. Papa's younger brother, Ed, married Eva Bruner. What do you mean, "Did we walk that three miles to school?" Of course we walked--except maybe two or three times a year when the weather was extremely bad. I might as well take time right here to mention another little incident which took place along our school trail. It involved one of the Bruner boys. And what happened to that boy should never happen to anyone. But when you get that many school kids in one bunch, most anything is apt to happen, and it did this time. In the first place, I guess school trails shouldn't cut across pastures, but they did. In the second place, I haven't been able to figure out why God made prickly pears, but He did. In the third place, if school kids are going to use the trails which wind in and out among the thorny bushes and cactus plants, they should never scuffle near prickly pears, but they did. And in the fourth place, if a boy scuffles and falls down, he should never sit right flat down in a prickly pear, but he did.