y that the boys could not upset them; in the
midst was a great stove; and against the wall stood the teacher's desk,
of un-planed plank. But as Glass used to say to his pupils, "The temple
of the Delphian god was originally a laurel hut, and the muses deign to
dwell accordingly in very rustic abodes." His labors in the school were
not suffered to keep him from higher aims: he wrote a life of Washington
in Latin, which was used for a time as a text-book in the Ohio schools.

In the early days all books were costly, and they were even fewer than
they were costly; but those who longed for them got them somehow, and
many a boy who studied them by the cabin fire became afterwards a great
statesman, a great lawyer, or a great preacher. In fact, almost every
distinguished Ohioan of the past generations seems to have begun life in
a log cabin, and to have found his way out of the dark of ignorance by
the light of its great hearth fire. Their stories are such as kindle the
fancy and touch the heart; but now they are tales that are told.

Among the stories of life in the backwoods, none are more affecting than
those of lost children. In the forests which hemmed in the homes and
fields of the settlers, the little ones often strayed away, or in their
bewilderment failed to find a path back to the cabin they had left among
the stumps of the clearing, or the leafless trunks of the deadening.
In 1804, two children, Lydia and Matilda Osborn, eleven and seven years
old, went to fetch the cows from their pasture a mile from their home in
Williamsburg, Clermont County. Lydia, the elder of the sisters, left
the younger in a certain spot while she tried to head off the wandering
cows. It is supposed that she failed, and came back to get Matilda. Then
it is supposed that, after searching for her, Lydia gave up in despair
and started homeward, but found that she no longer knew the way. In
the meantime the cows had left their pasture, and the younger girl had
followed the sound of their bells and got safely back to the village.
Night came, but no Lydia, and now the neighborhood turned out and helped
the hopeless father to search for the lost child. They carried torches,
and rang bells, and blew horns, and fired guns, so that she might see
and hear and come to them, and before them all, day and night, ran the
father calling, "Lydia, Lydia." Five hundred men, a thousand men at
last, joined in the quest, and on the fifteenth morning, they found
i