the oldest son of the oldest son for severalthe story is for seven generations. He has one sister, Mrs. John M. Scott, who lives at the old home, and one brother, Col. Benton

moved to a house meantime erected on a pleasant foot-hill, 100 yards southwest of the spring and the elm. There had appeared south and west of this house in the summer of 1829 a remarkable group of sycamores. They are shown in the cut of the house and are a lofty and beautiful grove. As they are of the same age as Mr. Halstead they have always been associated with him, and he values them very highly.

In his boyhood Murat Halstead worked on the farm in the summer and attended school in the winter. At nineteen years of age he became a student at Farmer's College, College Hill, seven miles north of the Ohio at Cincinnati, where he graduated in 1851, and at once made his home in Cincinnati, and wrote stories for the city papers and letters for country papers. While he was the literary editor of the Columbian and Great

Halstead, who resides at Riverside, Ohio. His mother died Aug. 29, 1864, and his father Oct. 29, 1884.

His mother taught him the alphabet, using the Hamilton, Butler county, Telegraph, as a primer, and he was able to read fluently when first sent to school at five years of age. The house where he was born was of hewn timber, standing nigh a spring that had been a famous place for Indian hunting encampments, a great number of stones in the

BOYHOOD HOME AND SYCAMORE GROVE.

neighborhood being burnt with many fires and the ground strewn with arrowheads. The spot is marked by a tree, a solitary elm.

When Murat was two years old the family

THE SOLITARY ELM.

West he had an offer to go upon the Commercial, which he accepted March 8, 1853. He became a member of the firm of M. D. Potter & Co. May 15, 1854.

March 2, 1857, he married Miss Mary Banks, a native of Cincinnati. Twelve children have been born to them, of whom seven sons and three daughters are living.

Upon the death of M. D. Potter in 1866, the firm of M. Halstead & Co. was organized, and January, 1883, the famous consolidation of the Cincinnati Commercial and the Cincinnati Gazette took place and Mr. Halstead was elected president of the CommercialGazette company. He is now more active and constant in daily labor than thirty-five years ago, and has repeatedly written three thousand words of editorial matter a day for a hundred consecutive days, the aggregate frequently exceeding five thousand words in one day's paper, written in one day. He did this in 1856 and in each presidential contest since, and as much in the third campaign of Hayes for Governor, and in each of Foraker's campaigns. It is probable, as this productiveness has continued with few intermissions (the whole not exceeding a year) for more than thirty-five years, and was preceded by voluminous writing in early youth of a romantic and miscellaneous character, that Mr. Halstead has furnished more copy for printers

Clergy-Wm. M. Thomson (author of "The Land and the Book "), Th. E. Thomas, David Swing, D. A. Wallace, Henry McCracken, B. W. Chidlaw. Governors, Ohio -Wm. Dennison, Chas. Anderson. Medical -Alex. Dunlap (surgeon), John S. Billings, S. W. Smith, E. B. Stevens. BusinessCalvin Brice, Geo. M. Parsons, Wm. Beckett. United States Senators-Benjamin Harrison, Ind., Republican candidate for President of the United States, 1888; J. S. Williams, Ky. Editors-Whitelaw Reid. Lawyers-Samuel Galloway, Thomas Milliken, Wm. J. Gilmore, C. N. Olds, John W. Caldwell, Wm. S. Groesbeck, Wm. M. Corry, Robert C. Schenck, Samuel F. Cary, Samuel F. Hunt, M. W. Oliver, etc.

TRAVELLING NOTES.

Monday, April 12-Oxford is on very high ground, a breezy place, with a good literary name. The University is 975 feet above the sea and 370 above Hamilton. From its tower, to which I ascended with President McFarland, I found a magnificent panoramic view of a rich country undulating in all directions with cultivated and grassy fields, interspersed with woodlands and dotted with the habitations of prosperous farmers whose families have had largely the educational advantages of this favored spot. So well up to the skies is Oxford that the President tells me that before the shortening of the tower the highlands east of the Little Miami, forty miles away, were discernible. The eye takes in the valley of the Great Miami and that bounteous tract lying east in this county called "The Garden of Ohio," so exceedingly fertile is it. Bayard Taylor, standing on the same spot, said: "For quiet beauty of scenery I have never seen anything to excel it and nothing to equal it, except in Italy. But Bayard was ever of amiable speech. Humboldt is stated to have remarked after an interview with him that he had travelled more and seen less than any man he had ever met a natural spurt for a matter-of-fact, dry scientist to give in the direction of a poet.

Oxford is purely a college town, and its various institutions are each in localities with pleasant outlooks. Among them is a sanitarium, the "Oxford Retreat," a private institution for the treatment of nervous diseases and insanity. Through its ample grounds winds a little stream named by General Wayne Four Mile Creek. After leaving Fort Hamilton on his march north he crossed a stream which he named from its distance from it Two Mile Creek. The next was Four Mile Creek, then 'Seven Mile," farther on another, "Fourteen Mile," etc.

Among the present residents of Oxford is Waldo F. Brown, a noted writer on horticulture and agriculture. Also David W. Magie, famed as the originator of the Magie or Po

They

land China hog, produced from four distinct breeds of bristlers about the year 1840. are now shipped all over the world, even to Australia, where they help to fatten and swell out the ribs of the descendants of the "canaries,' as the early enforced settlers were called from the color of their garments. Mr. L. N. Bonham, so widely known as an agricultural writer and President of the State Board of Agriculture, has here his "Glenellen farm, the raising of fine stock being his specialty.

President McFarland is a native of Champaign county, graduated in 1847 at Delaware, was seventeen years professor here, twelve at the State University, and then was unanimously called to his present position. He is a cheery gentleman, and I was pleased to see between him and the young men that sort of older brother relation so helpful and advantageous everywhere in this learning world. His specialties are mathematics, astronomy and civil engineering. In connection with the general discussion of the glacial epoch a few years since he completed the calculation of the eccentricity of the earth's orbit at short intervals for a period of over four and a half million years, and I have no doubt, if the occasion should arise, will be ready to go a few millions better.

"How doth the busy bee

Improve each shining hour!"

Associated with the thought of industry. flowers and honey, with now and then a sting, comes the bee. And if any man has a natural right to devote his life to this little golden-winged creature, it is one who has such a pretty alliterative name as Lorenzo Lorraine Longstreth. And he is found right here in Oxford in the person of a retired clergyman who has made a specialty of cultivating bees and written largely upon them.

66

In the spring of 1868 there came into my office in Cincinnati a large, portly gentleman, with rosy cheeks, a perfect blonde, a stranger who cheerily called me by name and put out his hand with the familiarity of an old acquaintance. I answered: "I do not remember having seen you, sir." Not surprising," replied he; it is forty years since we met. My name is Longstreth.' I then recollected him a stripling in college at New Haven and of going fishing with him-both of us boys together-I the little boy, he the big boy, and in a pure mountain stream with hook and line we brought up the crimson and golden beauties. In the very social time that ensued he gave me his history and how his life had been marred by a strange mental malady, an alternation of seasons of excessive uncontrollable joyousness and exuberation of spirits, followed by dreadful turns of despondency and mental agony. Before he left he wrote a note and directed it in pencil

and then said: "I want to show you something that may be useful," whereupon he passed his tongue over the pencil mark. Now," said he, "that, when dry, will be as ineffaceable as if written with ink -a useful thing to know in the spiriting away, the Hegira of one's inkstand.

In turn I showed him a sort of comic poetical extravaganza I had just that hour conceived. Being in a happy mood. it pleased him, as I hope it may now and then some reader, as it illustrates a phase of experience not unusual with young married people who, disappointed in the sex of their first-born, find in after years an occasion for rejoicing.

THE LASSIE MUSIC.

'Twas at creation's wakening dawn,
When MUSIC, baby-girl, was born;
The angels danced, the new earth sang,
And all the stars to frolic sprang,
While mamma cried, and papa run
And groaned, because 'twas not a son.

But when to years the lassie grew,
The happiest child the whole world knew,
Her sweet notes trilled so joyously,
And soothed all care so lovingly,
That mamma laughed and papa run
And danced, because 'twas not a son.

แ

My old friend, from his fondness for bees, has been termed the Huber of America. Some thirty or more years ago he wrote a book upon "the busy bee," and I am told there is no work upon the subject so fascinating, it is so filled with the honey of a benignant kindly nature. [Since the above_was written Mr. Longstreth has passed away.]

In my original visit to this county I made the acquaintance of Mr. James McBride, the historian of the Miami valley. In my varied experience I have been blessed in meeting and knowing many fine characters, ever to be fragrant in my memory, but none occupy a better

place than Mr. McBride. He was of Scotch descent, born near Greencastle, Pa., in 1788. His father soon after was killed by the Indians in Kentucky, so he was the only child. He came to Hamilton when eighteen years of age, and at twenty-five years was elected county, sheriff, the best office then in the gift of the people, and later to other offices. When I saw him he was clerk of court, yet public office occupied but comparatively few of his years. He was in easy though not affluent circumstances from ventures made to New Orleans in the period of the war of 1812, which gave him the leisure to devote to his loves.

He had scarcely arrived here when he began his researches into the local history of this region, gathering it directly from the pioneers. In 1869 was issued by Robert Clarke & Co., in two octavo volumes, his "Pioneer Biography of Butler County," and it was estimated he left no less than 3,000 MS. pages on local history and biography. He was the earliest archæologist of Butler county, and in connection with Mr. John W. Erwin, now of Hamilton, supplied 100 MS. pages, notes, drawings, plans of survey to Squier & Davis for the "Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley.' He was a convert to Symmes' theory of "Concentric Spheres," and furnished the means and wrote the book describing it. He gathered a library of some 5.000 volumes, largely illustrating Western history, and its destruction was an irreparable loss, from the great amount of rare original material it contained.

He never was so happy as when buried in his library pursuing his solitary beneficent work. He was a silent, modest man, avoiding public gatherings and all display, of sterling integrity, and charitable to a fault.

Mr. McBride contributed for my original edition the early history of the county, beside

other important matter. His writing was peculiar; round, upright, plain as print, and written evidently with laborious painstaking care, and with a tremulous hand. I can never forget how in my personal interview I was impressed by the beautiful modesty of the man, and the guileless, trustful expression of his face as he looked up at me from his writing while in his office over there in the old court-house square in Hamilton; and then unreservedly put in my possession the mass of his materials, the gathered fruits of a lifetime of loving industry. The State, I am sure, had not a single man who had done so much for its local history as he, unless possibly it was Dr. S. P. Hildreth, of Marietta, whom I well knew, and who resembled him in that quiet modesty and self-abnegation that is so winning to our best instincts.

He was fortunate in his domestic relations, and when he had attained the patriarchal age of threescore years and ten his wife died. From that moment he lost all desire to live, and prepared to follow her, which he did ten days later a beautiful sunset to a beautiful life, and then the stars came out in their glory.

MOSS ENG CONY.

COL. MINOR MILLIKIN.

1834, the son of Major John Millikin. He was a perfect hero, a Christian gentleman, and of the highest type in moral qualities. His will began with these heroic words: "Death is always the condition of living, but to the soldier its imminency and certainty sums also the condition of its usefulness and glory."

He was a college mate of Whitelaw Reid, who wrote of him: "He was my long-time friend. His death was the cruellest personal bereavement the war brought me. No one on the sad list of the nation's slain seems more nearly to resemble him than Theodore Winthrop."