And Nature holds the Kentuckians close even to-day--suckling at her breasts
and living after her simple laws. What further use she may have for them is
hid by the darkness of to-morrow, but before the Great War came she could look
upon her work and say with a smile that it was good. The land was a great
series of wooded parks such as one might have found in Merry England, except
that worm fence and stone wall took the place of hedge along the highways. It
was a land of peace and of a plenty that was close to easy luxury--for all.
Poor whites were few, the beggar was unknown, and throughout the region there
was no man, woman, or child, perhaps, who did not have enough to eat and to
wear and a roof to cover his head, whether it was his own roof or not. If
slavery had to be--then the fetters were forged light and hung loosely. And,
broadcast, through the people, was the upright sturdiness of the
Scotch-Irishman, without his narrowness and bigotry; the grace and chivalry of
the Cavalier without his Quixotic sentiment and his weakness; the jovial
good-nature of the English squire and the leavening spirit of a simple
yeomanry that bore itself with unconscious tenacity to traditions that seeped
from the very earth. And the wings of the eagle hovered over all.

For that land it was the flowering time of the age and the people; and the bud
that was about to open into the perfect flower had its living symbol in the
little creature racing over the bluegrass fields on a black pony, with a black
velvet cap and a white nodding plume above her shaking curls, just as the
little stranger who had floated down into those Elysian fields--with better
blood in his veins than he knew--was a reincarnation perhaps of the spirit of
the old race that had lain dormant in the hills. The long way from log-cabin
to Greek portico had marked the progress of the generations before her, and,
on this same way, the boy had set his sturdy feet.