ver to rejoicing in its glory and
prosperity. The streets were arched with flame, the great wells flaunted
their banners night and day, and the gas flared from innumerable pipes
and jets through sun and rain in every part of the town.

No such festival has commemorated the introduction of the grape culture
in Ohio, though this is one of the most poetic facts of our history.
When the changes of climate along the Ohio River rendered it
unprofitable in the region of Cincinnati, where the imaginative genius
of Longworth had first invented the Catawba wine which the poetic genius
of Longfellow celebrated in graceful song, the vine found home and
welcome along the shores of Lake Erie. There thousands upon thousands
of acres now spread interminable vineyards, and the grapes of every
American variety purple in autumn to an almost unfailing harvest.

It was at first only a dream when Longworth transplanted the wild vine
from the woods, and it might well have been scoffed at as akin to
dreams of the past which never were realized. One of these was the silk
culture, which people believed was to be one of our greatest sources
of wealth sixty or seventy years ago, when they planted millions of
mulberry trees to nourish the silkworms which died rather than become
citizens of Ohio. Another was the culture of the Chinese sorghum cane,
which for many years tantalized our farmers with the hopes of native
sugar never fulfilled.

Still other kinds of dreams there have been native to our air or
naturalized to it. The Leatherwood God was by no means the only
religious impostor who has flourished among us. In 1831 Joseph Smith,
the first of the Mormon prophets and the founder of Mormon-ism, came
to Portage County, with one of his disciples, and began to preach. They
made so many converts that some shortsighted people of Hiram thought
to stop their work by tarring and feathering them. This only drove
them from the place; but the next year, they settled in Kirtland, Lake
County, where, in 1834, their followers built the first Mormon temple,
for the worship of God according to the Book of Mormon. It was this
sacred book, written on gold plates, which Smith, a native of Vermont,
pretended to find, in a hill near Palmyra, New York, where he was
leading an idle and useless life. His converts at Kirtland increased to
three thousand, but they founded a bank as well as a temple, and so got
into debt and trouble. Smith left the state to escape the sh