s of life. The democrat time, increasing ease of
travel and the growth of large industries, gradually altered the relation
between these small communities, and the families who in the smaller
matters of life long remained singularly familiar with their poorer
neighbours and in the way of closer social intimacies far apart.

It seemed to me worth while to use the life of one of these groups of
people as the background of a story which also deals with the influence
of politics and war on all classes.

WESTWAYS

CHAPTER I

The first Penhallow crossed the Alleghanies long before the War for
Independence and on the frontier of civilisation took up land where the
axe was needed for the forest and the rifle for the Indian. He made a
clearing and lived a hard life of peril, wearily waiting for the charred
stumps to rot away.

The younger men of the name in Colonial days and later left the place
early, and for the most part took to the sea or to the army, if there
were activity in the way of war. In later years, others drifted westward
on the tide of border migration, where adventure was always to be had.
This stir of enterprise in a breed tends to extinction in the male lines.
Men are thinned out in their wooing of danger--the _belle dame sans
merci_. Thus there were but few Penhallows alive at any one time, and
yet for many years they bred in old-fashioned numbers.

As time ran on, a Penhallow prospered in the cities, and clinging to
the land added fresh acres as new ambitions developed qualities which
are not infrequently found in descendants of long-seated American
families. It was not then, nor is it now, rare in American life to find
fortune-favoured men returning in later days to the homes of their youth
to become useful in many ways to the communities they loved. One of
these, James Penhallow,--and there was always a James,--after greatly
prospering in the ventures of the China trade, was of the many who about
1800 bought great tracts of land on the farther slope of the Pennsylvania
Alleghanies. His own purchases lay near and around the few hundred acres
his ancestor took up and where an aged cousin was left in charge of the
farm-house. When this tenant died, the house decayed, and the next
Penhallow weary of being taxed for unproductive land spent a summer on
the property, and with the aid of engineers found iron in plenty and soft
coal. He began about 1830 to develop the property, and built a large