Wheeling Sunday register. [volume] (Wheeling, W. Va.) 1882-1934, 1896-04-19
FO1G'S BIRTHPLACE.
How Some People Are Unfortunate
in Early Youth,
And Afterward Sigh for the Log
Cabin and the Coonskin, the
Gooseberry Bush and the Fox
Hound.

For birthplace there is no house like
the log cabin with a coonskin on its
front and dense woods on four sides of
it. Greatness seldom takes its first
breath in anything but log cabin.
Though one may start out with good
eyes, patched pants, a Roman nose,
plenty of future and an abundance of
poverty, he may seek in vain for great
ness whose infancy was not nourished
in a log cabin.
l realize that I am so handicapped
My birthplace was in an old shabby
frame house which had been painted az
a much earlier period. 1t was one
which artists would love to delinate
from that angle which exposes the old
well and long limbed elm spreading over
it. But however artistic it may have
been, it could never take the place OF
the log cabin. l feel my misfortune
keenly and often, when l think of it,
can hardly take heart to thrive on with
any hope Of success.
What man who is ambitious to con-
troll a convention, own a two minute
horse. be President of the United States
or win prize fight, has not weakened
when he realized that he was born In
house that had paint on it, and had
heard door bell piano or a pug dog
before he waSod month old.
No proud mother would give to her
son biography in which there was to
be found nothing but frame and brick
houses. She would seek that biography
in which there was a log cabin in one
of the front pages. There would be that
coOnskin; the old hound would be lying
under the gOoSeberry bush in the i-ont
yard picking off burrs: the mother
would be standing in the doorway; and
the barefoot hero in patched pants
would would be either leaning over a
stump painting for books, or else just
around the corner on the wood pile
whiting out some great invention.
Then, again, in the back part of the
book, there would be a beautiful en-
craving OF a palace of stone, a carriage
and cOachman in front, big mastiffs
standing guard near the great stone
steps, and away back of the house an
other palace full OF well groomed horses
and costly carriages.
l would now give anything to have
been born in log cabin, and willingly
compromise by the absence of the COON
skin the hound, or even the gooseberry
bush; but the wrongs my parents did
me can never be made right, as ones
birth is always an event of the past.
My history can never read well without
a log cabin in the first part.
Often have | fingered, in vain. about
my birthplace in hopes of finding some
where in its structure only one unhewn
log might look out into the future
with brighter hopes. l learn. however.
from Aunty Hogan that there was a
sheep pelt on the smoke house and the
widest kind of woods just back OF the
old spring. Our dog then was neither
the hound Of the cabin nor the maStiff
OF the palace, but he was about an
eighteen carat bull dog, to whose men,
CRY l still cling.
No child that Will look for me for
whiSkerS and spending money will ever
be born in anything but log cabin. |
have always said that when am about
TO become father, | shall dismiss the
servants. sell the houses, bury the silver
ware, kill the mastiffs and retire with
my family TO my farm, where I shall
have prepared little log cabin with a
hound and a gooseberry bush. There 1