AROUND AN OLD HOMESTEAD

"SWEET Auburn, loveliest village of the plain,

Where health and plenty cheered the laboring swain,
Where smiling Spring its earliest visit paid,
And parting Summer's lingerings blooms delayed!
Dear lovely bowers of innocence and ease-
Seats of my youth, when every sport could please!
How often have I loitered o'er thy green,
Where humble happiness endeared each scene!"

-Goldsmith.

THE OLD HOMESTEAD.

"There is an appearance of comfort and freedom about this old house that renders it a pleasing object to almost every eye. The charm of these old houses, which are marked by neatness and plainness, and by an absence of all pretension, is founded on the natural yearning of every human soul after freedom and simplicity.

-Wilson Flagg.

"But I warrant you'd find the old as snug as the new did you lift the latch, For the human heart keeps no whit more warm under slate than beneath the thatch."

-Alfred Austin.

HERE are few more picturesque spots than the gently rolling country of southwestern Ohio. The old homestead of which I write nestles quietly among its hills. It is not far distant from the historic Fort Colerain, or Dunlap's Station, as it was sometimes called, on the bluffs of the Great Miami, where, in the winter of 1790-91, an attack was made on the garrison by Indians, led by the renegade Simon Girty, and a detachment of soldiers had to be sent out from Fort Washington, on the Ohio, to their aid. The old earthworks of the fort can yet be distinguished in outline from the highway along the river. The upward slopes across the stream can be seen very plainly from our vantage point; and it is one of the diversions on clear days to observe that part of the country through a field glass, and pick out the various farms, and speculate upon the buildings and fields that are too obscure to determine definitely.

An old log cabin, double-roomed, once stood near the site of the present homestead, in pioneer days, and still another, for temporary occupancy, while the farmstead was in building. It was in the former of these that grandfather kept all his money, hid behind a loose chunk, or board, in the attic. There was a little square hole left in the logs, on the ground floor, and through this the children used to peep at the travelers along the highway. A path led out to the road, and they crossed the fence by means of a stile. I have reconstructed the old cabin in my thought, surrounded with roses, and with its clapboard roof, its plowed-andgrooved board floor, and its old-time windows (some of the pioneer cabins boasted puncheon floors, and had tanned deerskins for the panes), and I know of one old man who was born in it who has since become a lawyer and judge in a great city, and whose practice has extended to the highest tribunal in the land, the Supreme Court of the United States at Washington.

Most of these log cabins of the early settlers have long ago been superseded by more substantial structures; but the attachment of their descendants to these old homesteads has generally kept them in possession of the family line, and each has its legends that go back to the Indians. My grandfather's was located in a region evidently once a favorite haunt of the red man. Flints, even now, are plowed up nearly every year. Indeed, one field used to be so strewn with arrowheads that we thought it must have been the scene of a battle, or at least the site of an encampment.

Starting from his father's farm, some few miles away, on horseback, with his money in silver in the