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They had a public library in 1796, and preaching in the blockhouse from the beginning. It was ordered that every one should keep the Sabbath by going to church, and all men between eighteen and forty should do four days of military duty every year, as well as "entertain emigrants, visit the sick, clothe the naked, feed the hungry, attend funerals, cabin raisings, log rollings, huskings; have their latchstrings always out." Perhaps the reader has heard before this of having the latchstring out, but has not known just what the phrase meant. The log cabin door in those days was fastened with a wooden latch on the inside, which could be lifted on the outside by a leathern string passed through a small hole in the door above it. When the string was pulled in, the door was locked; but the free-hearted man always left his latchstring out, so that every comer could enter and share his fireside with him. The good people of Marietta had soon occasion for all the kindness enjoined by their laws in befriending a hapless colony of Frenchmen, whom certain speculators known as the Scioto Company had lured from their homes in the Old World, and then abandoned to their fate in the heart of the Western wilderness, where they had been promised that they were to find "a climate wholesome and delightful, frost even in winter almost entirely unknown, a river called, by way of eminence, the _beautiful_ and abounding in excellent fish of a vast size; noble forests consisting of trees that spontaneously produce sugar, and a plant that yields ready-made candles; venison in plenty, the pursuit of which is uninterrupted by wolves, foxes, lions, or tigers; no taxes to pay, no military services to be performed." Some of the adventurers who came to Ohio on these flattering terms were destitute people who agreed to work three years for the company and were then, each to receive from it in reward for their labors fifty acres of land, a house, and a cow. But others were people of means, who joyfully sold their property in the French cities and came out to found new homes in the Western woods, with money in their hands, but with no knowledge of woodcraft, or farming, and able neither to hunt, chop, plow, sow, or reap for themselves. They were often artisans, masters of trades utterly useless in that wild country, for what were carvers and gilders, cloak-makers, wigmakers and hairdressers to do on the banks of the Ohio in 1790? Some ten or twelve peasa
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