I could thank him again and tell him what a
beautiful thing he did.

I remained with my mother till I was married to Mr. Pond in April 1854.
Again this northwest became my home. The Indians had sold their land to
the government and been sent farther west. The country was filling up
with white settlers. Bloomington has been my home ever since.

When I came to Bloomington as a bride there were seven motherless
children of the first Mrs. Pond, the eldest being about fifteen years
old. I brought with me my three fatherless children, so our family
numbered twelve. Our home was a log house of six rooms. There were no
schools anywhere within our reach. Every morning our children and some
of our neighbor's gathered about our long kitchen table which was our
dining table as well, for their lessons taught by the mother or one of
the older children. There were no sewing machines to make the numerous
garments necessary for our family, no lamps, no kerosene. We made our
own candles as well as our own bread and butter and cheese and soap. Our
lives were as busy as lives could be.

In the summer of 1856 we made bricks on our own place with which we
built the house where I have lived ever since. Mr. McLeod was our
nearest neighbor. North of us I cannot remember that we had any nearer
than Minneapolis. Down toward Fort Snelling lived Mr. Quinn in a little
bit of a house.

One night Mr. Pond was at the Old Sibley House at Mendota when a number
of traders were there. During the evening as they told stories and made
merry, many of the traders told of the joys of sleeping out of doors
with nothing between them and the starry sky; how they never minded how
hard the bed was if they could only see the green trees around them and
the stars above. Mr. Pond, who also had had experience in outdoor
sleeping, said that he liked nature too, but he preferred to sleep, when
he could, with a roof over him and a good bed beneath him. After some
laughter and joking on the subject, the traders, one by one, stole out
and gathering up all the feather beds the house afforded, heaped them
upon the bed in the attic which Mr. Pond was to occupy, thinking that he
would at once see the joke and return their beds to them. Instead, he
climbed upon the mountain of feathers, laughing at the joke on his
would-be-tormentors and slept comfortably all night while they had to
spend the night on hard boards. He loved to tell this story of how the
laugh was on them.