own at full
length until her fingers touched the ground, and in this way she was
keeping the hammock gently in motion.

She made a wonderfully graceful shadow, reclining in this dark place,
and no judge of the human form could have passed without a quick breath
of admiration for its delicate blending of strength and frailty, its
stamp of being thoroughbred. And it was along the line of thoroughbreds
that her thoughts were wandering.

Having acquired much of the Colonel's reliance in breeding, and in the
fitness of appropriately mated things, she was wondering! Her father and
mother had been illiterate mountaineers, but did there not exist a time
prior to this when their ancestors were people of refinement? This, she
felt, must be surely so, because of her early love of refined
things--truly refined, to a degree far beyond the ken of mountain life.
Without substantiating records, she seemed to know that in early
Colonial days her family of gentle blood had floated with the migratory
tide across the Appalachian range. That was the origin of all
mountaineers! What had held some there, instead of sending them on to
the rich, unsurveyed plains? A birth enroute? That sometimes happened.
The man of the family died, or was killed, and the woman forced to build
a shelter as best she might until the boys grew big enough to help?
That, too, had happened. Whatever the reason, some of the best
Anglo-Saxon stock had been stranded in the Cumberlands, staying there
literally and figuratively while the world advanced.

Perhaps her strain was purer than the Colonel's! Few mountaineers made
alien marriages, for the very sufficient reason that they seldom
roamed--even though this had meant stagnation in their own environment.
Still, the strain was pure! If one occasionally escaped these mountain
fastnesses, why should he not--why should she not--with a free rein,
dash out to regain lost prestige? Why should she not with one stroke
blot out five or six generations of ignorance, and bring the stifled
line of her honorable ancestry to the place it had been rightfully
demanding for a century? But, in the face of uncertainties, would her
blood commingled with the blood of established lineage now be fair?
Would she ever feel a rebuke in infant eyes? Would they not burn her
soul if she wantonly summoned them to open on a world which might point
back with a superior smile? Could she ever kiss the little lips which
might some day praise the fath