jostled, plotted and bartered, in the shops, in the streets, under the
trees.

And everywhere soldiers and officers of the Revolution--come West with their
families to search for homes, or to take possession of the grants made them
by the Government. In the course of a short walk John Gray passed men who
had been wounded in the battle of Point Pleasant; men who had waded behind
Clark through the freezing marshes of the Illinois to the storming of
Vincennes; men who had charged through flame and smoke up the side of King's
Mountain against Ferguson's Carolina loyalists; men who with chilled ardour
had let themselves be led into the massacre of the Wabash by blundering St.
Clair; men who with wild thrilling pulses had rushed to victory behind mad
Antony Wayne.

And the women! Some--the terrible lioness-mothers of the Western jungles who
had been used like men to fight with rifle, knife, and axe--now sat silent
in the doorways of their rough cabins, wrinkled, scarred, fierce, silent,
scornful of all advancing luxury and refinement. Flitting gaily past them,
on their way to the dry goods stores--supplied by trains of pack-horses from
over the Alleghanies, or by pack-horse and boat down the Ohio--hurried the
wives of the officers, daintily choosing satins and ribands for a coming
ball. All this and more he noted as he passed lingeringly on. The deep
vibrations of history swept through him, arousing him as the marshalling
storm cloud, the rush of winds, and sunlight flickering into gloom kindle
the sense of the high, the mighty, the sublime.

As he was crossing the common, a number of young fellows stripped and girt
for racing--for speed greater than an Indian's saved many a life in those
days, and running was part of the regular training of the young--bounded up
to him like deer, giving a challenge: he too was very swift. But he named