Thus it will be seen, says S. D. Gross in his beautiful eulogy of Drake,
 that his Alma Mater was the forest, his teacher Nature, his classmates birds,
 squirrels and wild flowers. Until the commencement of his sixteenth year,
 when he left home to study medicine, he had never been beyond the confines
 of the settlement at Mayslick, and it was not until his twentieth year, when
 he went to Philadelphia to attend lectures, that he saw a large city. The
 "Queen of the West," as Cincinnati was afterwards styled, was then a mere
 hamlet, with hardly a few thousand inhabitants. Kentucky, at that early day,
 had but one University, and although it was hardly fifty miles from his doors
 (Lexington), his father was too poor to send him thither.
    If Daniel Drake's mental education has been meager and fragmentary,
 his heart, the legacy of a good ancestry, had acquired the culture that was so
 characteristic of the mature man. S. D. Gross, who even in Drake's life-
 time looked upon Drake as one of the greatest men in America, tells us that
 at no time in his long and eventful life did his sweet, childlike, warm tempera-
 ment show itself so beautifully as on the occasion of his visit to the old log
 cabin, almost fifty years after he had left it to go to Cincinnati to study medi-
 cine. "It was to this spot that the boy, now in the evening of his full and
 perfect manhood, turns his longing eye, anxious once more to behold the home
 of his early childhood. He stands before the lone and primitive cabin of his
 father in which used to dwell all that were near and dear to him. The latch-
 string is off the door; the hearth no longer emits its accustomed light and
 heat; weeds and briars grow around and obstruct the entrance; no familiar
 voices are heard to greet and welcome the stranger; all is still and silent as
 the grave in God's acre close by. The birds no longer salute him with their
 merry music; the squirrel, whose gambols he was wont to watch with such
 peculiar fondness when a boy, is no longer there; even the tall and weather-
 beaten elm no longer greets him. All around is silence and desolation. Upon
 the 'door-cheeks' of the cabin he discovers the initials of his own name, which
 he had inscribed there with his rude penknife fifty years before !-silent wit-
 nesses of the past, reluctant to be effaced by time. As he looked around and
 surveyed the changes which half the century had wrought in the landscape
 before him, a feeling of awe and melancholy, unutterable and indescribable,
 seized his soul, and the sage of three-score years, the medical philosopher, the
 acknowledged head of his profession in the great valley of the Mississippi,
 was instantly transmuted into a boy of fifteen. Every feeling was unmanned,
 and tears, warm and burning, gushed from the fountains of his soul. The
 whole scene of his childhood was vividly before him; the manly form of his
 father, the meek and gentle features of his mother, the light and sportive
 figures of his brothers and sisters, stood forth in bold relief, and painfully
 reminded him of the vanity and instability of all earthly things. Of the whole
 family group, eight in number, which was wont to assemble around the bright
 and burning hearth, he alone remained to visit that tenantless and desolate
home of his childhood."
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