in the field where his heart was
always. In Xenia, in Cincinnati, in Columbus, in Louisville, he lived,
now here, now there, as his hopes and enterprises called him, and ended
at last on a little farm in Kentucky. His poetic vein was genuine; it
was sometimes overworked, but at least one poem of entire loveliness was
minted from it; and there are few American poems which impart a truer
and tenderer feeling for nature than Gallaghers "August," beginning--

"Dust on thy summer mantle, dust."

[Illustration: Whitelaw Reid 280R]

The life of Whitelaw Reid, who was born near Xenia in 1837, is a
romance of success from the beginning, of the kind that seems peculiarly
American. His people were Scotch Covenanters, with the stern convictions
of that race. It is said that his grandfather first settled in Hamilton
County, but rather than run a ferry boat on Sunday, as the deed of his
land bound him to do, he sold it and removed to Greene County, where his
father was a farmer when the boy White-law was born. He sent his son
to school and to college, and then left him to make his own way in the
world, which he did by first becoming a country editor, and then going
to the war as a newspaper correspondent, and taking part in several
battles as an aid-de-camp. He learned to know the war at first hand,
and he was well fitted to make his history of "Ohio in the War" the most
important of all the state histories. He spent two years in writing this
work of truly Ohioan proportions and of unfailing interest, and then he
became Horace Greeley's assistant on the New York Tribune. It was in the
course of nature that after Greeley's death he should become its owner
and director, and should take a leading part in national politics. He
has been our minister to France, and has acquired great wealth as well
as honor; but he has remained affectionately true to the home of his
youth, as his care of the old farmstead at Cedarville evinces.

Among the most eminent and useful citizens of the state was Nicholas
Longworth, who came from New Jersey to Cincinnati, when just of age, in
1803. He was first to introduce the culture of grapes and the making
of wine into Ohio; he planted the Catawba vine on the uplands of
Cincinnati, where it flourished till the destruction of the forests
changed the climate. He became very rich by his investments in lands,
but he never outgrew his sympathy with the poor and struggling, and his
hand was open to every one who