I am usurping the “deacon’s chair” and cheating you fellows as there is a shanty full of better liars and story tellers than I am, but to get back to where I started, next to Dad and Mother, there was a family we liked very much. The name of this family was McIntyre. There were the father, mother and six children, three boys and three girls, the latter ranging from fifteen years down. The boys were the oldest and did most of the work on the farm, that was done at all, which was seldom. The father, Phil McIntyre, was a dreamer, easy going. Looking back now, I would say that he was a romancer. He could find more in a pansy by the roadside than I could find in a forty acre field of roses. He was a great reader and in that rude log home, already crowded, he made room for his library of books with green covers. He called them his green library and it was large for anyone to have in those days.
    It always seemed heaven to me to go the four miles over to that home. I had to go through a dense woods to reach the house. How I loved those people, not just one but the whole family. They were the finest people in our neighborhood. Another thing Phil McIntyre was greatly interested in was horses and they were to be his undoing. He had four plow horses and two Kentucky race horses. The latter were a bay mare, called Irish Molley and a dark gelding, called Sniff. Every season, he went south with his two horses and when he returned, he would have to sell two or three hundred acres to meet some of his debts. Father told me that when he came to that country, McIntyre had a tract of four thousand acres all free of debt.
    His horses were fast enough to lose money on and his land holdings went quickly. In spite of it all, the Mclntyres were the happiest people I have ever met.
    If you are not too tired or do not want to go to your bunks, I will try to describe that home. It was a long two story log house. Here and there, the bark still stuck to the unhewn logs. There were four windows and a large door on the ground floor and two gable windows, one at each end of the building, on the second floor. The house stood a little to one side of the unkempt corn patch. The fences about the house were not well cared for as if they needed a man about the place. In fact, the outer appearance of the house was one of dinginess and desolation.