egetables out of the holes in
the garden.

In the afternoon he had gone to the pond in the woods to cut a drinking
place for the cattle. As he was returning with his axe on his shoulder,
the water on it having instantly frozen, he saw riding away across the
stable lot, the one of their neighbors who was causing him so much
trouble about the buying of the farm. He stopped hot with anger and
watched him.

In those years a westward movement was taking place among the
Kentuckians--a sad exodus. Many families rendered insolvent or bankrupt
by the war and the loss of their slaves, while others interspersed
among them had grown richer by Government contracts, were now being
bought out, forced out, by debt or mortgage, and were seeking new homes
where lay cheaper lands and escape from the suffering of living on,
ruined, amid old prosperous acquaintances. It was a profound historic
disturbance of population, destined later on to affect profoundly many
younger commonwealths. This was the situation now bearing heavily on
David's father, on three sides of whose fragmentary estate lay rich
neighbors, one of whom especially desired it.

The young man threw his axe over his shoulder again and took a line
straight toward the house.

"He shall not take advantage of my father's weakness again," he said,
"nor shall he use to further his purposes what I have done to reduce
him to this want."

He felt sure that this pressure upon his father lay in part back of the
feeling of his parents toward him. His expulsion from college and their
belief that he was a failure; the fact that for three years repairs had
been neglected and improvements allowed to wait, in order that all
possible revenues might be collected for him; even these caused them
less acute distress than the fear that as a consequence they should now
be forced so late in life to make that mournful pilgrimage into strange
regions. David was saddened to think that ever at his father's side sat
his mother, irritating him by dropping all day into his ear the half
idle, half intentional words which are the water that wears out the
rock.

The young man walked in a straight line toward the house, determined to
ascertain the reason of this last visit, and to have out the
long-awaited talk with his father. He reached the yard gate, then
paused and wheeled abruptly toward the barn.

"Not to-day," he said, thinking of Gabriella and of his coming visit to
her now but a few hours off.