Annals of our ancestors; one hundred and fifty years of history in the ...

6o ANNALS OF OUR ANCESTORS
When with our parents, to whom everything beautiful in God 's
world was Hnked with thoughts of Himself, we could readily
feel that indeed "the groves were God's first temples."
One day as we were riding through those Miami Hills and
were just leaving the valley, at a certain point father checked
Jennie and Fannie, the little bay horses he was driving, and,
pointing to a lone cabin not far from the road, said: "There
is where your mother and I were married!" It was a little
one-roomed cabin on a spur of one of the long ridges, and was at
that time a stable; an old horse stood by it switching off flies.
The situation struck me as being lonely and forbidding in the
extreme. Not a question was asked by me that I can remember,
and so this fine opportunity to learn of that eventful
time was lost. The little cabin had once been our mother's
home; there she was married; from that spot amidst the
beautiful hills she went to the farm our grandfather had cleared
from the forests of Hamilton County, and they started another
home. It began in a little one-roomed cabin, too; but those
rough walls enclosed a real home, where classic muses were
not unknown, and where ancient tongues were discussed and
the thinking was truly high, however lowly the Hfe may have
been.
Mother tells us that once when she had been absent for a
few days she thought on returning that she would open the
bed and make it up fresh, and when she came to turn over the
feather bed she found that a large black snake had slept between
the straw and feather beds and had, in coming forth,
left his hide. A search was made, but no further facts were
disclosed; and they retired, thinking that Mr. Blacksnake was
hunting mice and was a harmless reptile, and so they slept in
their bed with undisturbed slumber. In this little home we
"log cabin children" were born, and we were wont to brag of
it to little Joe and Ida in the years of childhood. William
was born there on October 5, 1836, and I, named for our Aunt
Julia Ann, first saw the light in that little log cabin on October
13, 1838.
It was not the intention of our parents to spend their entire
time in farming, so they studied together in the long evenings