On the bottom land, each year, we had a large and well assorted vegetable garden.  It produced much more than we could possibly use.  We boys would sell things from the garden for amusement and pin money.  During one summer vacation, a boy, one Johnnie Gray, a brother of L. D. C. Gray of this city, was visiting me.  We took a load of vegetables to Marysville.  After selling it, getting our lunch, paying for the shoeing of our horse (which in those days cost four dollars), and buying some ammunition for the gun, we had $1.50 left.  We quarreled as to how we should spend this remnant.  Not being able to agree, we started home without buying anything.  On the outskirts of Marysville was a brewery.  The price of a five-gallon keg of beer was $1.50.  We concluded to take a keg home with us.  It was an awfully hot summer day, and the brewer was afraid to tap the keg, thinking that the faucet would blow out under the influence of the heat before we got home.  He gave us a wooden faucet, and told us how to use it.  “Hold it so,” he said, showing us, “hit it with a heavy hammer, watch the bung, and when you have driven it in pretty well, then send it home with a hard blow.”  We were sure we could do it.  We drove home, put the beer in the shade by the well, spread a wet cloth over it, and then put our horse away.  My parents chided us for throwing our money away on beer.  In the cool of the evening we concluded to tap the keg.  One of us held the faucet and the other did the driving, but we did not have the success predicted for us by the brewer.

At the critical moment we drove in the bung, but not with sufficient momentum to fasten the faucet.  It flew out of our hands into the air, followed by the beer.  In about a minute the keg was entirely empty.  We were overwhelmingly drenched and drowned by the escaping beer, but never got a single drop of it to drink.

On another occasion some of us children were coming home from Marysville.  We were driving an old white horse, named “Jake,” who knew us and loved us as only a good horse can.  He submitted to our abuses, shared in our pleasure and would not willingly have hurt any of us.  We were in a small, one-seated spring wagon.  While driving through a lane, moved on by the spirit of deviltry, one of us whipped Jake into a run, and the other one threw the reins over a fence post.  The result was as could have been expected by any sane-minded individual.  The horse stopped so suddenly that he sat down on the singletree, and broke both the shafts of the wagon.  We were hurled out with great force, and got sundry bruises and abrasions.  We wired up the shafts and got home as best we could, and, I am sorry to say, we lied right manfully as to the cause of the accident.  We told a story of a drunken Mexican on horseback who chased us a considerable distance, and finally lassoed the horse, bringing him to so sudden a stop as to cause the damage.  Instead of being punished, as we should have been, we were lauded as heroes of an attempted kidnapping.