use for the father whom
these months had aged out of all resemblance to the former self in knee
breeches and powdered wig with lips that broke quickly into smiling.

And Peter, watching the bud of Dorothy's childhood swell to the slim
charms of girlhood, held his own counsel and worshipped her dumbly.
Perhaps he remembered the gulf that had separated his father's log cabin
from her uncle's manor house in the old Virginia days, but of these
things no one spoke in Kentucky.

Three years had passed, and along the wilderness road was swelling a
fuller tide of emigration, hot with the fever of the west.

Meeting it in counter-current went the opposite flow of the
faint-hearted who sought only to put behind them the memory of hardship
and suffering--but that was a light and negligible back-wash from an
onsweeping wave.

Caleb Parish smiled grimly. This spelled the beginning of success. The
battle was not over--his own work was far from ended--but substantial
victory had been won over wilderness and savage. The back doors of a
young nation had suffered assault and had held secure.

Stories drifted in nowadays of the great future of the more fertile
tablelands to the west, but Caleb Parish had been stationed here and had
not been relieved.

The pack train upon which the little community depended for needed
supplies had been long overdue, and at Caleb's side as he stood in front
of his house looking anxiously east was his daughter Dorothy, grown tall
and pliantly straight as a lifted lance.

Her dark eyes and heavy hair, the poise of her head, her gracious
sweetness and gentle courage were, to her father, all powerful reminders
of the woman whom he had loved first and last--this girl's mother. For a
moment he turned away his head.

"Some day," he said, abruptly, "if Providence permits it, I purpose to
set a fitting stone here at her head."

"Meanwhile--if we can't raise a stone," the girl's voice came soft and
vibrant, "we can do something else. We can plant a tree."

"A tree!" exclaimed the man, almost irritably. "It sometimes seems to me
that we are being strangled to death by trees! They conceal our
enemies--they choke us under their blankets of wet and shadow."

But Dorothy shook her head in resolute dissent.

"Those are just trees of the forest," she said, whimsically reverting to
the old class distinction. "This will be a manor-house tree planted and
tended by loving hands. It will throw shade over a sacred s