he whole story whenever they asked,
and Henderson L. Burns once took down what I said and made me swear to
it. Whenever I came to the jingle of the money in the bag as we put it
in the carriage on starting for the Wades', they cross-examined me till
I said I sort of seemed to kind of remember that it jingled, and anyhow
I recollected that Judge Stone had said "Hear it jingle, Jake!" This
proved either that the money was there and jingled, or that it wasn't
there and that the judge was, as N.V. said, "As guilty as hell."

Dick McGill didn't know which way the cat would jump, and kept pretty
still about it in his paper; but he printed a story on me that made
everybody laugh. "There was once a Swede," said the paper, "that was
running away from the minions of the law, and took refuge in a cabin
where they covered him with a gunny sack. When the Hawkshaws came they
asked for the Swede. No information forthcoming. 'What's in that bag?'
asked the minions. 'Sleighbells,' replied the accomplices. The minion
kicked the bag, and there came forth from under it the cry, 'Yingle!
Yingle!' We know a Dutchman who is addicted to the same sort of
ventriloquism." (Monterey _Journal_, September 3, 1857.)

In 1856 we cut our grain with cradles. In 1857 Magnus and I bought a
Seymour & Morgan hand-rake reaper. I drove two yoke of cows to this
machine, and Magnus raked off. I don't think we gained much over
cradling, except that we could work nights with the cows, and bind
day-times, or the other way around when the straw in the gavels got dry
and harsh so that heads would pull off as we cinched up the sheaves. At
that very moment, the Marsh brothers back in De Kalb County, Illinois,
were working on the greatest invention ever given to agriculture since
the making of the first steel plow, the Marsh Harvester.

Every year we broke some prairie, and our cultivated land increased. By
the fall of 1857, my little cottonwood trees showed up in a pretty grove
of green for a distance of two or three miles, and were ten to fifteen
feet high: so I could lie in the shade of the trees I had planted.

But if the trees flourished, the community did not. The panic of 1857
came on in the summer and fall; but we knew nothing, out in our little
cabins, of the excitement in the cities, the throngs on Wall Street and
in Philadelphia, the closing banks, the almost universal bankruptcy of
the country. It all came from land speculation. According to what they
sa