There were no rich people then, but all were poor together, and there were no classes. They were so helpless without one another that people were kindlier and friendlier as well as freer then than now, and they made the most of the corn huskings and quilting bees that brought old and young together in harmless frolics. The greatest frolic of all was a wedding; the guests gathered from twenty miles around, and the frolic did not end with the dancing at night. Next day came the _infair_ at the house of the bridegroom, and all set off together. When they were within a mile or two, they raced for the bottle which was always waiting for them at the house, and the guest whose horse was fleetest brought it back, and made all drink from it, beginning with the bride and groom. Religion soon tempered the ruder pleasures of the backwoods, but the dancing ceased before the drinking. Camp meetings were frolics of a soberer sort, where whole neighborhoods gathered and dwelt in tents for days in the beautiful autumn weather, and spent the nights in prayer and song. Little log churches were built at the crossroads, and these served the purpose of schoolhouses on week days. But there was more religion than learning in the backwoods, and the preacher came before the teacher. He was often a very rude, unlearned man himself, and the teacher was sometimes a rude man, harsh and severe, when he was learned. Often he was a Scotch-Irishman, whose race gave schoolmasters to the West before New England began to send her lettered legions to the frontier. Such a teacher was Francis Glass, who was born in Dublin in 1790, and came to Ohio in 1817, to teach the children of the backwoods. One of these afterwards remembered a log-cabin schoolhouse where Glass taught, in the twilight let through the windows of oiled paper. The seats were of hewn blocks, so heavy that the boys could not upset them; in the midst was a great stove; and against the wall stood the teacher’s desk, of un-planed plank. But as Glass used to say to his pupils, “The temple of the Delphian god was originally a laurel hut, and the muses deign to dwell accordingly in very rustic abodes.” His labors in the school were not suffered to keep him from higher aims: he wrote a life of Washington in Latin, which was used for a time as a text-book in the Ohio schools. In the early days all books were costly, and they were even fewer than they were costly; but those who longed for them got them somehow, and many a boy who studied them by the cabin fire became afterwards a great statesman, a great lawyer, or a great preacher. In fact, almost every distinguished Ohioan of the past generations seems to have begun life in a log cabin, and to have found his way out of the dark of ignorance by the light of its great hearth fire. Their stories are such as kindle the fancy and touch the heart; but now they are tales that are told.