* Cat / Camel / Cow / Jug

Composition

Subject: The Cat

The cat is a very interesting animal. He is a small fur dog that meows and has wiskers [sic] + several other things. He has  four paws-to [sic] front paws + two behind ones and a tail.

He has been known for many years two of him having been known to be on the ark where he must have been tied up or what would have become of the rats?

Cats dont  be cats [sic] until they are a year old when they stop being kittens which they were born as. It takes a kitten several weeks to get its eyes open if it doesn’t get drownded [sic] before that time and he scratches when he is mad.

My father says camels used to be cats but got their backs up one day and couldn’t get them down again and so became camels.

I never heard a camel meow but I suppose they can because they can do most anything, have seven stomachs and going many days [sic] without water.

“Conundrums” written in perpendicularly

Me + my wife + bobtail dog

Crossing the creek on a rotten log

The log did break + me did fall

And there we lost our jug and all.

If I had a cow that gave such milk

I’d clothe her in the finest silk

I’d feed her on the choicest hay

And milk her forty times a day.

When  go toiling to my farm

I take the little brown jug under my arm

I place it under a shady tree

Little brown jug tis you and me.

Here you are so near my nose

Tip her up + down she goes.

A 1929 sample of J. Walter's handwriting shows a backward slant to the letters in his pocket diary unlike the samples above. That may have to do with the difficulty of wrting in such a small document, or it may not.

Evangeline's 1902 handwriting has a vertical somewhat backward tilt to it.