that memorable song-campaign which gave to the state the
fixed sobriquet of "Buckeye." Drawing near the capital, where the
convention was to be held, a log cabin, on an enormous wagon, passed
the chariot. A dozen horses fancifully adorned were harnessed to this
novel vehicle; flowers over-ran the cabin-home, hewn from the buckeye
logs of the forest near Marysville. In every window appeared the faces
of merry lads and lasses, and, as they journeyed on, their chorus
echoed over field and through forest. The wood-cutter leaned on his ax
to listen; the plowman waved his coonskin cap, his wife, a red
handkerchief from the doorway of their log cabin.

"Oh, tell me where the Buckeye cabin was made?
'Twas built among the boys who wield the plow and spade,
Where the log-cabin stands in the bonnie Buckeye shade."

From lip to lip the song had been carried, until the entire country
was singing it, and the log-cabin had become a part of the armorial
bearings of good citizenship, especially applicable to the crests of
presidents. Well might the people ask:

"Oh, what has caused this great commotion
All the country through?"

which the ready chorus answered:

"It is a ball a-rolling on
For Tippecanoe and Tyler, too!"

The least of the strollers' troubles at this crucial period of their
wanderings were the bad roads or the effects of song and log-cabin
upon the "amusement world," the greatest being a temperance orator who
thundered forth denunciations of rum and the theater with the
bitterness of a Juvenal inveighing profligate Rome. The people crowded
the orator's hall, upon the walls of which hung the customary banners:
a serpent springing from the top of a barrel; the steamboat, Alcohol,
bursting her boiler and going to pieces, and the staunch craft,
Temperance, safe and sound, sailing away before a fair wind. With
perfect self-command, gift of mimicry and dramatic gestures, the
lecturer swayed his audience; now bubbling over with witty anecdotes,
again exercising his power of graphic portraiture. His _elixir
vitae_--animal spirits--humanized his effort, and, as Sir Robert Peel
played upon the House of Commons "as on an old fiddle," so John B.
Gough (for it was the versatile comic singer, actor and speaker)
sounded the chords of that homely gathering.

Whatever he was, "poet, orator and dramatist, an English Gavazzi," or,
"mountebank,"