ment which he had witnessed as a boy in Fairfield County,
Conn.: "I remember very well the tide of emigration through
Connecticut, on its way to the West, during the summer of 1817. Some
persons went in covered wagons--frequently a family consisting of
father, mother, and nine small children, with one at the breast--some
on foot, and some crowded together under the cover, with kettles,
gridirons, feather beds, crockery, and the family Bible, Watts's Psalms
and Hymns, and Webster's Spelling-book--the lares and penates of the
household. Others started in ox-carts, and trudged on at the rate of
ten miles a day. . . . Many of these persons were in a state of
poverty, and begged their way as they went. Some died before they
reached the expected Canaan; many perished after their arrival from
fatigue and privation; and others from the fever and ague, which was
then certain to attack the new settlers. It was, I think, in 1818 that
I published a small tract entitled _'Tother Side of Oldo_--that is, the
other view, in contrast to the popular notion that it was the paradise
of the world. It was written by Dr. Hand--a talented young physician
of Berlin--who had made a visit to the West about these days. It
consisted mainly of vivid but painful pictures of the accidents and
incidents attending this wholesale migration. The roads over the
Alleghanies, {403} between Philadelphia and Pittsburg, were then rude,
steep, and dangerous, and some of the more precipitous slopes were
consequently strewn with the carcases of wagons, carts, horses, oxen,
which had made shipwreck in their perilous descents."

But in spite of the hardships of the settler's life, the spirit of that
time, as reflected in its writings, was a hopeful and a light-hearted
one.

"Westward the course of empire takes its way,"

runs the famous line from Berkeley's poem on America. The New
Englanders who removed to the Western Reserve went there to better
themelves; and their children found themselves the owners of broad
acres of virgin soil, in place of the stony hill pastures of Berkshire
and Litchfield. There was an attraction, too, about the wild, free
life of the frontiersman, with all its perils and discomforts. The
life of Daniel Boone, the pioneer of Kentucky--that "dark and bloody
ground"--is a genuine romance. Hardly less picturesque was the old
river life of the Ohio boatmen, before the coming of steam banished
their queer craft from the water.