talent for trousers, which early experience undoubtedly encouraged me in later life to gather in all the stray pantaloons to cut over into knickerbockers for my numerous boys.
Raids on the Chinese vegetable wagon provided supplies for our cooking over a row of small, outdoor fire-places we had built in a low bank in our yard. Once my mother was much disturbed to find a little pot of squirrel meat cooking on the stove. She needn’t have worried, for I knew as well as she that strychnine, slipped into a small piece of watermelon rind, transferred its evil potency to the body of the little beast that ate it. But it was sport to hang him up as I had seen the men do at the ranch when butchering a sheep, to skin him and dress the meat, and pretend it was a stew for Isabel, the doll. I had a large collection of squirrel skins tacked up on the barn at the Shepherd house.
After a couple of years we built our own house in the same neighborhood on the south-east corner of Court and Hill Streets. It began as a seven room cottage, white with green blinds to suit father. Later the roof was raised and a second story inserted and the house painted a more fashionable all-over gray, to suit the ladies.
My mother was a happy woman when, after eleven years of married life, she moved into her very own home. A few months later she suddenly died, leaving my father widowed a second time, a lonely man for the remaining fourteen years of his life.
Mother had never been a strong woman and was
