“Did you ever hear of the man? Few of your generation have, yet I remember him as I saw him when I was a lad, sixty years ago, and my mother, who was Massachusetts born, numbered him among her distant kin. She said, and she had it from her mother, that he was born in Boston in the year of Paul Revere’s ride; and that his real name was Chapman (the same as my mother’s), John Chapman. He was a studious boy, and wished to be a preacher, having a zealous streak to go overseas and teach the heathen, but what with the war and troubled times, the way was not made straight. Yet the times were fair enough for falling in love, and this he did with one Anice Chase, but while he bestirred himself for the wherewithal to marry, the white plague laid its hands on her. In those days, at the first sign, the victim was set apart as doomed, and so it was with Anice. Only a year from their betrothal, and John journeyed on foot three days out from Boston town to her father’s farm to bid her good-by. “It was a May afternoon, and the lilacs and apples in the yard were all abloom; Anice on a couch lay under one of those trees, for she would not rest content indoors; the sight and smell of the flowers were all she thought or spoke of. Long they talked together, and then she said so feebly that he could scarcely hear, ‘Go and preach, but not to the far-off heathen. Stay in your own land, but go westward, preach Christ and the Garden of Eden, which is Home, and wherever you go plant the apple, the Tree of Life that stood in the midst of the garden, as its symbol and mine. For I shall reach the garden first and wait for you close to the door.’ “That night Anice died. John Chapman soon after fell ill of a fever, they said from exposure on his homeward journey, and when he recovered, he had strange fancies, and then totally disappeared. “Soon after the year eighteen hundred, early in spring, and for nearly half a century following, a traveller made his way from western Pennsylvania into Ohio, journeying straight across country to the Indiana border, whether there were houses in his route or not. He was a strange-looking figure, tall, gaunt, and clad in curiously assorted garments, sometimes hatless and barefoot, sometimes wearing mismated shoes and a peaked cap of his own manufacture. Either on his back, or else in a small cart that he dragged after him, he carried a bag filled with apple seeds. Whenever he came to a likely spot, he would loosen the ground with a rude, strong hoe, plant some seeds, weave saplings into a strong enclosure to keep the cattle out, and then pass on. Wild beasts never molested him, the rattlesnakes turned from his path, and the Indians, brutal as they were at that time in their treatment of the settlers, not only never harmed him, but treated him with reverence as a messenger of the Great Spirit.