deceased old gentleman, and his surviving son James Clinton, in the provincial service of the last war.

I am with regard, your obt. and Humble Servant,

W. M. TRYON."

Thomas Ellison, Jr., had a town house at No. 13 Broadway, near the Bowling Green, New York city, long occupied by the Ellison family in winter. At his death, childless, in 1796, he left a large estate in both city and country. The "Ellison and De Peyster" water grant is known to all lawyers, and many a conveyancer will be glad to learn something more of the name of Ellison which appears constantly in abstracts of title in the city of New York. By his will Colonel Ellison bequeathed to the Episcopal church at New Windsor an endowment sufficient to establish it on a sure footing. His property descended largely to the children of his brother William Ellison of New Windsor, who had married Miss Floyd of Long Island, a connection of the family of the "signer."

William Ellison died in the year 1810, at his estate in New Windsor, leaving three children: Thomas Ellison (3d), who married Harriet Rumsey, daughter of Colonel Charles Rumsey of Cecil county, Maryland, a gentleman facile princeps in his county and an officer in the Revolutionary war; Elizabeth, who married Benjamin Floyd of Long Island; and Margaret, who married John Blackburn Miller of New York. The eight children of Thomas Ellison (3d) and Harriet Rumsey were well known to the older families of the state: Mary J. married Thomas De Lancey, Eliza married Dr. Edward Bullus, Henrietta married Charles F. Morton, U. S. A., John married Mary A. Ross, Caroline married Edmund Morton, Emily married John L. Morton, Thomas (4th) married Mary A. Ellison (2d, Elizabeth Baker), Charlotte married William C. Maitland. Charles F., Edmund, and John L. Morton were brothers, and sons of General Jacob Morton, famous in the early annals of New York city under the state government. They were likewise nephews of Josiah Quincy of Boston and of Washington Morton who married Cornelia, daughter of General Philip Schuyler.

On some parts of the old New Windsor property, held under title deeds dating back to the first settlement of the county of Orange, or indeed of that part of the province of New York, still live some of the descendants of the honored first proprietor of the region, John Ellison of old New Castle-on-Tyne.

Bot Ruden Fowler

GLIMPSES OF LOG-CABIN LIFE IN EARLY OHIO

It is hardly possible to imagine a more picturesque field for the novelist as well as the historian, than the wilderness farms of the heroic settlers of eastern Ohio during the memorable years when that state was girding on its armor preparatory to knocking for admission to the Union. The families who planted their crude homes in the new country were chiefly from New England, representing its best blood, its industry, and its thrift, together with the heroism of all the ages. Log-cabins were erected with comparative ease, and dainty hands were not slow to give them touches of color. An honest title-deed to any given number of acres of rich land was a powerful incentive to its clearing and cultivation, which few ambitious young men could resist. Thus we find these settlers running all manner of risks to accomplish their purposes, even that of starvation-for unless there was a flour-mill within reach the Indian huntinggrounds were anything but comfortable in the beginning.

A chapter of romantic interest might chronicle the adventures and disappointments of a party of Frenchmen, who, captivated by the glowing descriptions of Joel Barlow, journeyed across the Atlantic to find the enchanting region where every man might become a great land-owner; a paradise, with "climate healthy and delightful, scarcely such a thing as frost in winter, magnificent forests of a tree from which sugar flows, and a shrub which yields candles; venison in abundance, without foxes, wolves, lions, or tigers; no taxes to pay; no military enrollments; no quarters to find for soldiers; a river called by way of eminence The Beautiful, abounding in fish of enormous size;" and the land only five shillings per acre! In his Story of Ohio Alexander Black says: "The jolly scrapings of a fiddle were one night heard by the Ohio boatmen as they drifted past a hitherto untenanted part of the Scioto region. Fast and furious came the melodies, to which sounded the accompaniment of dancing feet. Occasionally a shout of approval greeted the player, but the shout was lustiest when the instrument gave forth the strains of the Marseillaise. For among the tall sycamores was encamped a company whose members had traveled all the way from sunny France."

Joel Barlow did not return to America for many years after his famous efforts to sell land in Ohio, but devoted himself to politics and letters. He never wandered through the state which his gifts as a poet enabled

him to picture as such a veritable Arcadia; never paused before log-cabin doors to observe the life within, and how in the midst of loneliness and danger it was possible to find means of recreation—even to the giving of a stately ball. At all "raisings" and "quilting-parties" in the early times a dance usually followed in the evening, "and if there was no fiddler, good whistlers and good singers were plenty."

The description of the building of a log-cabin by John S. Williams, who removed with his father's family from one of the Carolinas to the locality in Ohio directly west of Wheeling, West Virginia, is suggestive in the superlative degree. He says: "Our cabin had been raised, covered, part of the cracks chinked, and part of the floor laid, when we moved in, on Christmas day! There had not been a stick cut except in building the cabin. We had intended an inside chimney, for we thought the chimney ought to be in the house. We had a log put across the whole width of the cabin for a mantel, but when the floor was in we found it so low as not to answer, and removed it. Here was a great change for my mother and sister, as well as the rest, but particularly my mother. She was raised in the most delicate manner in and near London, and lived most of her time in affluence, and always comfortable. She was now in the wilderness, surrounded by wild beasts, in a cabin with about half a floor, no door, no ceiling overhead, not even a tolerable sign for a fireplace, the light of day and the chilling winds of night passing between every two logs in the building, the cabin so high from the ground that a bear, wolf, panther, or any other animal less in size than a cow, could go under without even a squeeze.

Such was our situation on Thursday and Thursday night, December 25, 1800, and which was bettered only by very slow degrees. Our family consisted of my mother, a sister of twenty-two, my brother, nearly twentyone and very weakly, and myself in my eleventh year.

In building our cabin it was set to front the north and south, my brother using my father's pocket compass on the occasion. We had no idea of living in a house that did not stand square with the earth itself. We had, as the reader will see, a window-if it could be called a window when perhaps it was the largest spot in the top, bottom, or sides of the cabin at which the wind could not enter. It was made by sawing out a log, placing sticks across, and then, by pasting an old newspaper over the hole and applying some hogs' lard, we had a kind of glazing which shed a most beautiful and mellow light across the cabin when the sun shone on it. All other light entered at the doors, cracks, and chimney. The size of our cabin was twenty-four by eighteen. The west end was occupied by

two beds, the centre of each side by a door, and here our symmetry had to stop, for on the opposite side of the window, made of clapboards and supported on pins driven into the logs, were our shelves. Upon these shelves my sister displayed, in ample order, a host of pewter plates, basins and dishes, and spoons, scoured and bright. It was none of your new-fangled pewter made of lead, but the best London pewter, which our father himself bought of Townsend, the manufacturer. These were the plates upon which you could hold your meat so as to cut it without slipping and without dulling your knife. But alas! the days of pewter plates and sharp dinner knives have passed away never to return.

Our chimney occupied most of the east end; pots and kettles opposite

the window under the shelves, a gun on hooks over the north door, four split-bottom chairs, three three-legged stools, and a small eight-by-ten looking-glass sloped from the wall over a large towel and comb-case. These, with a clumsy shovel and a pair of tongs, made in Frederick, with one shank straight, completed our furniture-except a spinning-wheel, and things to work with. It was absolutely necessary to have three-legged stools, as four legs of anything could not all touch the floor at the same time.

The first winter our living was scanty and hard: but even this winter had its felicities. We had part of a barrel of flour which we had brought from Frederick town, and part of a jar of hogs' lard brought from old Carolina; not the tasteless stuff which now goes by that name, but pure leaf lard, taken from hogs raised on pine roots and fattened on sweet po