AT one time, in our early recollection, my Father bought a number of yearlings early one spring, and the highest price he paid was three dollars a head. He kept them until they were over two years old, and I think there were sixteen steers among them, and he sold the steers to Irvin Melton for eight dollars a head. One spring, when I was a small boy, he sold to Wilson Perryman, his cousin, eight cows and calves for eight dollars each—sixty-four dollars for all. He got that all in silver half-dollars, and put it in an old tin bucket and sat it up on the cupboard, and the same year, about September, he sold to John Selby one hundred head of hogs for one hundred dollars, all in silver, and he put it in the same bucket, and when the neighbor’s children would come over, we would get it down and pour it out on the floor, to show them how much money we had. Finally John Hodson borrowed it and entered three forties of land, where New Hope now stands.
[The Eggs.]
SIXTY Years ago, when we were at work in the field, and would hear the cranes, out on the prairie, making a great noise, we knew they were nesting. They would go into the lakes and gather the rushes and pile them up very much like a large shock of hay, so that it would come above the water, then they would make a little flat place on top and deposit two eggs on that flat place; the eggs was a little larger than a goose egg, while they were shaped just like a quail’s egg, they were white in color with small brown specks all over them. When we could get a hat full of prairie hen’s eggs, and we believe no better flavored egg can be found, when they were boiled, then with a dish of fresh butter, a boy was surely fixed.