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On the very same day when we had finished harvesting the hay, there was a party at Peer Jensen at Tranegaard, who was a homesteader who had recently relocated from Vallebo. These people kept bees and brewed mead. My mother gave me four schilling for pocket money and I was supposed to use that to buy a pint of mead. This would go nicely with the slice of bread that mother cut for me and wrapped in a red handkerchief for me.

I remember the first time when we ploughed our own property and as I recall it was a rather short lived affair. Hans Jørgen and I went out into the field to plough, and the larger one of the two of us would handle the plow while the other one would guide the lead horse. We had four horses hitched to the plow and I was now old enough to lead them. However, when we reached the far end of the acre and had to turn around, we ran into a bit of trouble. He spoke to me in a very rough tone and I of course gave it right back to him. He then told me that I was under his command and that I'd better keep quiet while he was speaking. Upon finishing that sentence he slapped me on the side of the head. I of course thought that this was extremely disrespectful! So I threw the reigns to the ground and ran home to tell mother how rude

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he had been to strike me. How he had managed to get the four horses unhitched and brought back home was no concern of mine. My mother could see that this wasn't working out at all. So she made inquiries about hiring a farmhand whose name was Jørgen Petersen and who was the brother to my uncle Christian's wife on my mother's side. He had served in the army and was by all accounts a very capable guy. As I grew older and gained a better understanding of things, I always felt that the reason that my siblings and I received as much of an inheritance as we did, following the passing of our parents, was largely thanks to Jørgen's sense of loyalty to our family. However, he was also a very strict leader and he utterly refused to ask us to do something more than once. He had acquired a bit of money which he lent to my mother for the purchase of better horses that in turn would allow him to plough deeper. He also spent much time fixing and maintaining the farm equipment in order to better work the ground. The harvest that we took in the following year already showed great improvements due to his hard work and ingenuity. He would spread marl to a different parcel of land each year, and during this time all my brothers and sisters were required to lend a hand. Some of us were in the marl pits loading the carts while others were in the field distributing it. As we dug deeper and deeper into the ground we'd get to a point where two horses no longer were able to pull the load out of the hole