rhaps unconscious that he bestrode a horse, his
head was thrown back and his gaze penetrated the lace-work of branches
to a sky exquisite blue where a few white, puffy clouds were aimlessly
suspended. And, like these clouds, his thoughts hovered between
unrealized hopes and the realistic mountains he was leaving; thoughts
interwoven with ambitions which had obsessed his waking hours and
glorified his dreams--dreams, desires, ambitions, always before his eyes
but out of reach. His hair fell to the opened collar of a homespun
shirt, and homespun were his trousers, tucked into a pair of homemade
boots. His saddle bore an obscure brand of the United States army, for
it had carried one of his people through the War of the States fifty
years before, and across its pummel balanced a long, ungainly rifle of
an earlier period.

It was an afternoon of that month when the spirit of Kentucky arises
from the loamy soil after a recreating sleep of winter. The fragrance of
the earth was everywhere. Overhead the trees met in great, silent
arches--Nature's Gothic, re-frescoed now in the delicate tints of spring
by the brush of Nature's Master--beneath which all life seemed
breathlessly poised as though in this dim-lit, sun-dappled cathedral of
the forest a mute service were in progress. But the man--he did not seem
to see, or feel, or be. Thus, without a sound except for the muffled
shuffle of the old mare's unshod hoofs, he rode.

They were coming down the mountain, he and the old white mare; coming
down into the valley, into the "settlements"; and to-day marked the last
stage of his journey from the center of those wild giants which had
bounded the territory of his twenty-two years' existence. To-day he
would emerge from the foothills into the open country; into the smiling
country of his imagination, from somewhere in whose expanding fields now
came the call of a toiling plowboy. It was this which finally brought
him from his reverie in the sky, from his lofty dreams to the smell of
earth.

Drawing down his gaze, he saw that here, indeed, was the open threshold
of a new world, and his eyes distended with a veritable glory of sight.
They had seen distance, but not like this. They had ranged from mountain
peak to mountain peak, or across the scarred tops of intervening peaks
to a skyline untamed even by the coaxing tints of rose and purple
sunsets; but before him now lay distance of another kind: hills upon
hills, 'twas true, yet lo