child, and as a little boy slept with her in a tester bed covered with a canopy.

Before they went to sleep, she would tell him stories of the old days. Of Margaret, her mother, she said that on the way to Montgomery, over the usual route from Pennsylvania, Margaret stopped at a settler's house to get lunch. They gave her cornbread which she had never seen before. She took it poUtely, but when out of sight, she hid it in a hollow stump. Poor lady. It is to be feared that before her days were over she learaed to eat corn-bread, and in the slang of today, "to like it." Lydia said that Margaret had killed a deer which swam up to her canoe, by holding it under water till it drowned. Lydia herself had killed two deer, one with a rock and one with the pole of a canoe. When she was a girl, one of the family killed a large rattlesnake. Full of curiosity, she opened its mouth with two sticks to look at the fangs. The poison flew out, higher than her head. She was soundly berated by her father. You may be sure they skinned the snake, made a belt of the hide and boiled down the meat to make oil for Arhibald's rheumatism. Late in life, at the age of 95, Lydia was baptised. Her mind was failing by this time. "It was a cold day in the fall of the year. She was mighty shaky. Some people called it palsy," Jack Altizer told us. "They led her out into the river, and she began to try to get away." Whether the baptism was completed we do not know. If poor Lydia had mind enough left to reason, she probably preferred the idea of hell-fire, on that cold day, to the icy water. But she met her death in that same river. At the age of one hundred, she attempted to cross it on horseback at Broad Shoals. She was said to be on her way to take salt to the cattle at what is now the George Thompson place. The river was frozen over. But the ice broke, and the lumps knocked Lydia from her horse. She was borne 124