tiny.

[Illustration: Aarun Burr and Blennerhassett 200]

Blennerhassett put all his fortune into the venture. He ordered
fifteen large boats built for transporting five hundred men down the
Mississippi, he contracted for provisioning them, and pledged himself
for the payments of all kinds of debts. His friends tried to reason with
his folly in vain. Governor Tiffin called out a company of militia to
prevent his boats from leaving the Muskingum; Blennerhassett heard
that he was to be arrested, and fled; a troop of Virginians seized
his island, pillaged his house and ruined his grounds; and Mrs.
Blennerhassett with her children embarked amid the ice-floes of the Ohio
on a small flatboat and made her way to her husband in Louisiana. Here
he was taken, but discharged after a few weeks' imprisonment. They came
back to their island, but they never lived there again, and in 1811 the
house was burned. They wandered from place to place, and grew poorer
and poorer; in 1831 he died at the house of his sister in the island of
Guernsey, and seven years later his wife ended her days in a New York
tenement house.

[Illustration: Johnny Appleseed 202]

Another picturesque figure of our early times was one who never meant
and never imagined harm to any living creature, man or beast, but
gave his simple, humble life to doing good, with no thought of his own
advantage. Perhaps as the world grows more truly civilized the name of
Johnny Apple-seed will be honored above that of some heroes of the Ohio
country. Like so many of our distinguished men, he was not born in our
state, but he came here in his young manhood from his birthplace in
Massachusetts, and began at once to plant the apple seeds which gave him
his nickname.

Few knew that his real name was John Chapman, but it did not matter;
and Johnny Appleseed became his right name if men are rightly named from
their works. Wherever he went he carried a store of apple seeds with
him, and when he came to a good clear spot on the bank of a stream, he
planted his seeds, fenced the place in, and left them to sprout and grow
into trees for the orchards of the neighborhood. He soon had hundreds
of these little nurseries throughout Ohio, which he returned year after
year to watch and tend, and which no one molested. When the trees were
large enough he sold them to the farmers for a trifle, an old coat or an
old shirt, and when he needed nothing he gave them for nothing. He went
barefoot in