where on one farm might be more sheep, cattle, and slaves than Chad had seen
in all his life; where the people lived in big houses of stone and brick--what
brick was Chad could not imagine--and rode along hard, white roads in shiny
covered wagons, with two "niggers" on a high seat in front and one little
"nigger" behind to open gates, and were proud and very high-heeled indeed;
where there were towns that had more people than a whole county in the
mountains, with rock roads running through them in every direction and narrow
rock paths along these roads--like rows of hearth-stones--for the people to
walk on--the land of the bluegrass--the "settlemints of old Kaintuck."

And there were churches everywhere as tall as trees and school-houses
a-plenty; and big schools, called colleges, to which the boys went when they
were through with the little schools. The master had gone to one of these
colleges for a year, and he was trying to make enough money to go again. And
Chad must go some day, too; there was no reason why he shouldn't, since any
boy could do anything he pleased if he only made up his mind and worked hard
and never gave up. The master was an orphan, too, he said with a slow smile;
he had been an orphan for a long while, and indeed the lonely struggle of his
own boyhood was what was helping to draw him to Chad. This college, he said,
was a huge brown house as big as a cliff that the master pointed out, that,
gray and solemn, towered high above the river; and with a rock porch bigger
than a great bowlder that hung just under the cliff, with twenty long, long
stone steps to climb before one came to the big double front door.

"How do you git thar?" Chad asked so breathlessly that Melissa looked quickly
up with a sudden foreboding that she might lose her little playfellow some
day. The master had walked, and it took him a week. A good horse could make
the trip in four days, and the river-men floated logs down the river to the
capital in eight or ten days, according to the "tide." "When did they go?" In
the spring, when the 'tides' came. "The Turners went down, didn't they,