him to go to the patch and dig a bushel of sweet potatoes and take them to town and exchange them for a little tea, sugar, lemons and bread.  He failed in this and was returning when, he met a dear, sweet woman, Mrs. Underwood, that I called my “Texas Mother.”  She called to Mr. Holt, and asked him how I was.  He told her I was sick and out of anything to eat.  She took the potatoes and sent the articles I wanted.  I believe I should have died had he returned without them, for I was almost famished for food and sick besides.

I was in Columbia one day and stopped at the Old Columbia Hotel, owned by the Messrs. Park, two bachelors.  Mrs. Ballenger a widow was renting it from Messrs. Park.  I said to them:  “If you ever need a tenant, send for me.”  In a few months Mrs. Ballenger’s daughter died and she left.  Mr. Park sent for me to come.  We had a car load of good plain furniture and bedding, some handsome tableware, but no money to buy provisions.

Dear old mother Gloyd was a great help to me.  She had once kept hotel herself.  I did not ask credit, and this is how I got the money to begin keeping hotel:  There was an Irish ditcher named Dunn whose wife did my work.  She was a good cook.  I borrowed of Mr. Dunn three dollars and fifty cents, and with this money began the hotel business.  The house was a rattle trap, plastering off, and a regular bed-bug nest.  I fumigated, pasted the walls over with cloth and newspapers, where the plastering was off, and made curtains out of old sheets.  My purchases were about like this for the first day:  Fifty cents worth of meat, coffee ten cents, rice ten cents and sugar twenty-five cents, potatoes five, etc.  The transients at one meal would give me something to spend for the next.  I assisted about the cooking and helped in the dining-room.  Mother Gloyd and Lola attended to the chamber work, and little Charlien was the one who did the buying for the house.  I would often wash out my tablecloths at night myself and iron them in the morning before breakfast.  I would take boarders’ washing, hire a woman to wash, then do the ironing myself.  Columbia was a small village of not more than five hundred people.  It was the terminal of a railroad called the Columbia Tap.  Mr. Painter, the conductor, began boarding with us right off and in three or four days he brought a family there to board by the name of Oastram, father, mother and two boys, having come south to buy a plantation.  Mrs. Oastrom handed me a ten dollar bill.  I called Lola and Charlien upstairs and showed them the ten dollar bill.  We were overjoyed; we danced, laughed, and cried.  Charlien said:  “Now we can buy a whole ham.”  For several months my little children and I ate nothing but broken food.  I can never put on paper the struggles of this life.  I would not know one day how we would get along the next.