street.

"Right foot, left foot"--without a change of expression the boy broke
into an irrepressible jig. He was nineteen and stood six feet four in
his stocking feet; the wind tilted his tall hat, showing his high
forehead, his straight, straw-coloured hair, and solemn, light blue
eyes; it whipped back his linen duster, disclosing his lean legs clad in
tight trousers, his frock coat, and white stock. An indescribable air of
adventure enveloped him. So Abraham Lincoln may have looked on some
dress-occasion morning in his youth--all big bones and promises waiting
for something to happen.

"I sure am going to give 'em the slip this time," Ambrose panted,
stopping to readjust his costume and to take another careful survey of
the neighbourhood. In his garden several lilac bushes were in their
first bloom, and above his doorway an ardent, over-early honeysuckle had
blossomed in the night. The young man put the honeysuckle in his
buttonhole.

[Illustration: "Leaping ditches, tearing across ploughed fields, to the
woods ahead"]

"I reckon," he remarked, "there ain't nothin' sweet that don't grow in
Kentucky," and then with a smile whose shine radiated through his
homeliness and a blush that spread to the tips of his big ears, he
added: "I ain't just figurin' on the growth of flowers," and was off
tiptoeing down his garden walk and stepping across his gate to avoid
the creak of opening it.

This was fifty-five years ago in Kentucky, in a little village of some
three or four hundred inhabitants, shut in by hills and by inclination
in the southwestern part of the state; a community not to be confounded
with their high-living, high-stepping blue grass neighbours, for
dwellers in the "Pennyrile" were a plainer people, who perhaps drew some
of their characteristics from the bittersweet, pungent "Pennyrile" grass
that gave the locality its name.

As for the town itself, it rested primly in a cup-shaped hollow with
three main streets. One of them, travelling farther than the rest, led
in a way to the end of things for the residents of Pennyroyal as it
climbed a hill at the foot of the village, set thick with hardy
perennials, evergreens, and small white stones, while encircling this
hill was Peter's Creek, that by and by grew up to be a river, but it had
a tranquil movement, proceeding slowly on its course by reason of
sharing the Pennyroyalian distaste for getting any distance from home.

Then the houses in Pennyroyal: altho