not, the team must come out for the final service, and I stand about or drive the team around to keep them in warm blood until the final benediction, when I get to the barn once more and work till ten o'clock to make the horses dry and fix their feed and bedding for the night.

Somewhere along in the forties I well remember my own "æsthetic" outburst in the way of an establishment. It is said of Thackeray when he essayed to keep a carriage and horses that he was not able to do so with the income the sale of his books afforded, the same may have been said of me in respect to my one horse harness shop, but I got an old steady animal and a second hand rockaway and paid for them in my line, picked up someone's old harness that had been left at my shop for repairs and so I got out as fine a rig as was suited to my grade and means as is usually seen on the streets, an animal entirely safe for my wife or anyone else to drive; then up and down these streets she wandered with those babies of ours, the envy of lots of old settlers who had no horse or wagon or babies to boast of. I call to mind one of the incidents connected with one of their airings. It was a habit of my wife to drive in the outskirts and note the new streets that were in those days being opened up, reporting progress to me at night; one day after she was well out on her rounds a friend came in my shop and said that he saw my wife in a rockaway full of babies driving a black horse with a counter

brush tail going through where they are opening Oregon street. "Well, said I, that's all right, let her go, there is no law against it yet."

Now I have never taken time to think whether that friend meant to throw any slur at either horse, rockaway, harness wife or babies, for any lack of æsthetics on our part.

Yet

I took a look at this friend's rig the other day, it was all tip top, he has a fine pair of roadsters with copious tails, yet he seldom indulges in a ride himself, the ladies of his family adorn the establishment better than if he were present. it pains me to say that his coachman has the cockade in his hat on the wrong side, and that narrow banded affair of a hat too looks like the same old plug Paddock sold the head of the household in 1840, ironed over and made to fit the coachman by taking out a lot of cotton batting from under the lining. Such is the progress of the "æthetics" out in that part of the avenue of the world, and I don't blame my friend for his independence even if he fails to carry out the nicer points in the progress of æsthetics. He knows well enough that that word was not brought here by any of the old settlers, and we all like to be independent and do as we please in spite of what Mrs. Grundy dare say.

The wild and unbroken forests and plains that spread themselves to the north and west of us a half century ago have become the animated centers of the republic while the

unpeopled shores of the Pacific are now alive with the best blood of the Anglo Saxon race, and the almond eyed Mongolians are coming in faster than many white people really desire.

When we came here the entire domain north and west of Ohio could barely boast of a million people; to-day one-third of our entire population has found permanent homes away off there where we had not the heart to face the untutored savages or contend against the wild beasts so vividly decribed in our geographies. The greater part of that teeming west was an unpeopled wilderness and an unexplored waste on our maps.

Since you older settlers made your homes in this county many important events have been added to the history of our country, and it is a wonderful page to contemplate when the more notable ones are placed upon it. Some of you took part in or were contemporaneous with the last war with Great Britain. We have had a contest with Mexico and agreed, to quit by taking a slice of her valuable domain. We have had wars innumerable with the aborigines and been continually compelling them to go west and give our people room to swing a cat and breathe. We have settled two important boundary questions with Great Britain that threatened badly for a time. We have acquired territory of other nations quite enough to make a dozen empires. We have added state upon state until

We have

the number is so great that it troubles our people to keep tally of the increase. We have put down the greatest rebellion since the days of the Peloponnesian war. We have wiped out slavery as with a sponge. We have struck oil in the hill sides and gold and silver and iron in the mountains. thrown a network of railways all over the land, and the meshes of wires above our heads are so interwoven that they form a sort of lace curtain against the rays of the sun. Steamships cross the Atlantic Ocean in a fraction over a week. The earth and sea are many times girded with stretched wires. So much has transpired which is worthy of mention since you settled here that the ennumeration becomes tiresome and the items widen so infinitely that it appears useless to attempt an approximation towards a fair schedule of all that has come to pass since your early days in Cuyahoga County. At the rate things have been moving for the past fifty years, it bewilders the mind to attempt to comprehend what may take place in another fifty years. The city has been made over anew since we first set our feet emphatically down in Cleveland; our great avenue, Superior street, can scarcely show us a monument in the shape of a building that stood there when we came. The venerable town pump that graced the head of Bank street and supplied near half the town with water has been swept away; it is not the same town we saw any more than we are the same persons, for they tell us that we renew ourselves every seven

years. We have worn out two jails and are developing considerable friction on the third and fourth. The three lonely churches that were the only places for public worship have increased to hundreds, and yet we have a great share of wicked people among us.

The public schools as well as the public school houses of Cleveland have been a marked feature in our civilization. From the old and unambitious Academy on St. Clair street, which was the only school building in our earlier days, we have erected four or five HIGH SCHOOL BUILDINGS, the last of which is the wonder of modern times; it is claimed to be quite high enough for practical use, from base to pinnacle it will measure fully one hundred and forty feet, Columbus College standard, where three barley corns make one inch, and it has innumerable gables as well. "Is not that pretty high?" Every tax payer says "UMPH.” It is not every youth that can boast of so much outside show in order to gain the inner adornments of the head, and you who had knowledge ingrafted at the old Academy or the schools which preceded it may be proud that "æsthetics" were invented so that your grand children could revel in the halls of our high schools; shall we wait to see what our high school house will be 40 years hence?

After that "old Academy" our public schools multiplied to a wonderful degree until every quarter of the city was adorned by one or more of those educators of the coming people.