Page:Forty years of it (IA fortyyearsofit00whitiala).pdf/43

 family, and the birthplace, too, of John Quincy Adams Ward, the sculptor, and the possession of a personality in itself distinguishes a town.

I was walking with my father across Market Square not long ago; it had shrunk in size and seemed little and mean and sordid, despite the new city hall that has replaced the old, and there was no miserable prisoner idly sweeping the cobblestones, though the negro drivers with their bull whips were snoozing there as formerly.

"They have been there ever since eighteen sixty-six," said my father, who had gone there in the year he had mentioned on his coming out of college.

His home was in Piqua, a town not far away, where his father had retired to rest after his lifelong labors on a farm he had himself "cleared" in Montgomery County many years before. This paternal grandfather was a large, gaunt, silent man, who spoke little, and then mostly in a sardonic humor, as when, during that awful pioneer work of felling a forest to make a little plantation, he said to his grown sons who were helping to clear away the underbrush of a walnut wood:

"Boys, what little you cut, pile here."

Few other of his sayings have been preserved, and it may be that he has left behind an impression that he never talked at all because he never talked politics, and not to do that in Ohio dooms one to a silence almost perpetual. He had once been a Democrat, and had participated with such enthusiasm in the campaign of 1856 that he had kept his horses'