Among my heart-breaking sobs I pointed to a small round hole under the doorstep. The terrified scream of my mother remained in my memory forever more. Her baby had “mos’ caught” a snake. I recall nothing more for nearly a year and a half, when my terrors again took possession. An esteemed and greatly beloved relative of the family had died. The funeral services were to be held four miles away. All the household would attend excepting myself and the younger of my two brothers, David, some sixteen years old, who was deputed to act as body guard, doubtless under strict orders. I can picture the large family sitting room with its four open windows, which room I was not to leave, and my guardian was to remain near me. Some outside duty called him from the house and I was left to my own observations. A sudden thunder shower came up; massive rifts of clouds rolled up in the east, and the lightning darted among them like blazing fires. The thunder gave them language and my terrified imagination endowed them with life. Among the animals of the farm was a huge old ram, that doubtless upon some occasion had taught me to respect him, and of which I had a mortal fear. My terrors transformed those rising, rolling clouds into a whole heaven full of angry rams, marching down upon me. Again my screams alarmed, and the poor brother, conscience stricken that he had left his charge, rushed breathless in, to find me on the floor in hysterics, a condition of things he had never seen; and neither memory nor history relate how either of us got out of it. In these later years I have observed that writers of sketches, in a friendly desire to compliment me, have been wont to dwell upon my courage, representing me as personally devoid of fear, not even knowing the feeling. However correct that may have become, it is evident I was not constructed that way, as in the earlier years of my life I remember nothing but fear. There can be no doubt that my advent into the family was at least a novelty, as the last before me was a beautiful blue-eyed, curly-haired little girl of a dozen summers. That the event was probably looked for with interest is shadowed in the fact of preparations made for it. The still existing few pieces in my possession testify to the purchase of a full, complete and withal rather aristocratic dinner set of “Old Willow,” which did faithful service many years; and the remaining bits of dainty pink and white, tell of the tea set to match, in the cups of which were told the future of many a merry party that learned their reality through still later years, not all pink and white.