The cabin home and the narrow clearing about it formed his playground.
His first toy was a half-bushel measure, which he called his "bushee!"
This he rolled before him around the log cabin and the paths made in the
tall grass, frequently to the dread of his mother, who feared that he
might encounter some of the deadly serpents with which the forest
abounded. He remembered on one occasion, when his mother found him going
too far, she called:

"Come back, Fernando; mother is afraid you will step on a snake."

He looked about him with the confidence of childhood, and answered:

"No 'nakes here."

Just at that moment, the mother, to her horror, saw a deadly reptile
coiled in the very path along which the child was rolling his "bushee,"
and with true frontier woman's pluck, ran and snatched up the
bare-footed Fernando, when only within two feet of the deadly serpent,
carried him to the house, and with the stout staff assailed and killed
the rattlesnake.

He remembered seeing the wild deer bound past the cabin door, and one
day his father killed one. The big dog called "Bob," on account of the
shortness of his caudal appendage, on another occasion leaped on a wild
buck as he was passing the house, and seized the animal, holding it
until it was slain. Wild turkeys were common; he saw them in great
flocks in the woods, and did not suppose they could ever become extinct.

Fernando never forgot his first pair of shoes. He had grown to be quite
a lad, and his bare feet had trod the paths in the forest, and over the