On the other hand, the vicinity where Mr. Howells spent his _Year in a Log Cabin_ is even more lonely than it was then. It had a name in the long ago--Eureka Mills. But fire, which in our country is an even more potent destroyer than floods of what men build, has razed the mills, the dam has crumbled, the mill-race is a dry ditch choked with weeds and brush, and the name is well-nigh forgotten. When I was there the only man-dwelling was a vacant house that stood close to the site of the old log cabin. I might have thought the locality entirely deserted if it had not been for fences and cultivated fields and two cows grazing in a pasture. The only person whom I saw on the highway while I loitered about was a rural mail-carrier jogging along in his cart.
Round about were low, rounded hills, fertile and well-tilled for the most part, with here and there patches of woodland and occasional snug groups of farm buildings. It is a land flowing with milk and honey, wonderfully productive and prosperous, and charming in its luscious agricultural beauty. In Mr. Howells's youth it was wilder and more forested, but I fancy that the stream, with its wooded banks, must be essentially the same, and that the birds flitting and singing and the other wild creatures of fields and woods are like those of old.
Log houses, once so common in the Ohio country within the memory of its elderly people, are now rare, and I could learn of none within less than a dozen miles of Eureka Mills. But I found one on the outskirts of Jefferson which was intact and serviceable, though it no longer sheltered a family; and both Jefferson and Dayton have a log cabin preserved as a relic of the past.
Any place that has been Mr. Howells's home has reason to be proud of the fact, for he has long been recognized as the foremost of living American authors, and it seems safe to conclude that much of his work will have a permanent place in our literature. Yet I got the impression that, as a rule, the people in those Ohio communities with which he has been associated are unaware of his existence. Others, however, not only are familiar with his reputation, but regard him with enthusiasm and affection. At Columbus Rev. Washington Gladden, the most notable of all Ohio preachers, has made _Years of My Youth_ the subject of a Sunday evening discourse; and it is particularly gratifying to find that _A Boy's Town_ is a favorite book in Hamilton, and that the Boy Scouts there call themselves the Boy's Town Brigade.