The latter, however, was boarded up-nobody could remember a time when it was not. The little log house, with its chimney of sticks, its roof of warping clapboards weighted with traversing poles and its "chinking" of clay, had a single door and, directly opposite, a window. Apparently the man's zeal for agriculture had burned with a failing flame, expiring in penitential ashes. There were evidences of "improvement"-a few acres of ground immediately about the house had once been cleared of its trees, the decayed stumps of which were half concealed by the new growth that had been suffered to repair the ravage wrought by the ax. His simple wants were supplied by the sale or barter of skins of wild animals in the river town, for not a thing did he grow upon the land which, if needful, he might have claimed by right of undisturbed possession. He lived alone in a house of logs surrounded on all sides by the great forest, of whose gloom and silence he seemed a part, for no one had ever known him to smile nor speak a needless word. Many of them had already forsaken that region for the remoter settlements, but among those remaining was one who had been of those first arriving.
The whole region was sparsely settled by people of the frontier-restless souls who no sooner had hewn fairly habitable homes out of the wilderness and attained to that degree of prosperity which today we should call indigence, than, impelled by some mysterious impulse of their nature, they abandoned all and pushed farther westward, to encounter new perils and privations in the effort to regain the meager comforts which they had voluntarily renounced. In 1830, only a few miles away from what is now the great city of Cincinnati, lay an immense and almost unbroken forest.
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