field's birth. He kept a tavern, a log house with two rooms. Boats could ascend the Muskingum from the Ohio to that locality, transporting goods for the settlers, who were pouring in to occupy the fertile lands. Those were the days when the settlers were dependent on their rifles for their meat and clothing. Men wore caps made from the skins of the raccoon or muskrat, with deerskin jacket and pantaloons, which a soaking rain and the subsequent drying made as stiff and ridged as corrugated iron. Those were the days of cabin-raisings, choppingmatches, log-rollings, and huskings for the men, and of quiltings, sewing-bees, and peach parings for the women; the rude, unlettered days of the frontier; of a community that was putting forth tremendous physical strength; clearing the land, cutting down the forest, building roads, rearing houses, preparing the foundations of the Republic. The young man Abram Garfield, the while, lived at Worcester till he was fifteen, when he went to Madrid, St. Lawrence Co., N. Y., where he remained several years. From there he made his way to Newburg, near Cleveland. Hearing that his old neighbors, Mrs. Ballou and her family, were at Zanesville, he went down to see them. He was twenty years of age. His former play.. mate, Eliza Ballou, was a comely maiden of eighteen. Is it a wonder that he, far from home, alone in the world, should find his heart going out toward the girl whom he had known so intimately through by-gone years; or that she should think him the one man in all the world who could make her happy through life? They were married by Justice of the Peace Hogan, February 3, 1821. The only home he could offer her was a log cabin, eighteen by twenty feet, containing one room. It had two doors and three windows. They were too far from civilization, and too poor in pocket, to obtain a sash or purchase glass; but the young wife stretched greased paper across the holes in the side of the house, waiting till the coming of better times. "We were quite stylish; better off than some of our neighbors," said Mrs. Garfield, laughingly, to the writer. The fireplace was made of stones, surmounted by a chimney of sticks and mud. The floor was of hewn puncheons; the roof of slabs and bark. a In such a house the young couple began life, the wife cooking their corn bread in a "Dutch oven," kettle with a rimmed cover, on which live coals were heaped. The oven, a frying-pan, an iron pot, wooden plates, and knives and forks for the husband and wife; a bed in one corner; stools made by the husband with an ax and auger this the outfit. Children came to bless them, four in number; the last, the subject of this sketch, born, as already stated, November 19th, 1831. It was the canal-constructing period. Ohio was building the Pennsylvania Canal, running from Cleveland to Beaver, Penn., below Pittsburgh; and the Pennsylvania and Ohio Canal, extending from Cleveland, south, to the Ohio River. Abram Garfield, full of pluck and energy, put in a bid for the construction of a section of one of the canals. Only a single scrap of his handwriting is preserved, and that is in relation to the bid for the contract the closing sentence "If any of it is struck to us, we will begin at once." He secured the contract, realizing a good profit; but a second contract, owing to a sudden rise in the price of labor, proved disastrous, sweeping away all former earnings. When his debts were paid, nothing remained except the humble home and the small farm, partially paid for. III. SURROUNDINGS. T will be instructive just here to pass in rapid review IT the condition of the country at the time when James Abram Garfield was born. The census had just been taken, showing a population of about thirteen millions. Cleveland contained one thousand and seventy-five inhabitants. Chicago was a cluster of houses around Fort Dearborn. Sylvester Marsh, who has recently constructed a railroad to the summit of Mount Washington, was supplying the fort and the few people in Chicago with fresh beef, hanging them up for dressing on the branches of an oak upon the site now occupied by the city hall of that metropolis of nearly half a million people. A few settlers had made their way into Wisconsin as Indian traders. Not till James A. Garfield was three years of age, was there a furrow turned in the State of Iowa. James Monroe, the last of the statesmen of the Revolutionary period, was passing away. The statesmen of the second period - Webster, Clay, Calhoun, and their compeers were in the thick of the fight. It was the period of the great forensic contest between Webster and Hayne, the period when South Carolina was asserting the doctrine of nullification. In 1831, engineers were laying out lines of railroad from Boston to Lowell, Worcester and Providence, and from Albany to Schenectady. In 1835, when James A. Garfield was nearly four years old, the directors of the Boston and Worcester Railroad were building a freight depot in Boston, forty by sixty feet, which they declared would give ample freight accommodations for a decade of years! A great change was taking place in this western world. The Erie Canal, begun in 1817, through much opposition, had been triumphantly carried through by De Witt Clinton. It was completed in 1825. The Dutch farmers around Albany called it Clinton's big ditch. The penny-a-liners of the press had composed lampoons on Clinton. I give a specimen : "Oh, a ditch he would dig, from the lakes to the sea, The construction of the canal facilitated emigration to the West, and the people of New England began their great exodus, pouring into northern Ohio, planting schoolhouses and churches side by side. The great period of cotton-manufacturing had already begun, and Lowell was sending out its fabrics to compete with England in the trade which that country had exclusively engaged up to 1823. Though the cotton manufactures had commenced, the farmers were still |