the beginning of the end when one summer day, toward sunset, a few tired,
rugged backwoodsmen of the Anglo-Saxon race, wandering fearless and far into
the wilderness from the eastern slopes of the Blue Ridge and the
Alleghanies, had made their camp by the margin of the spring; and always
afterwards, whether by day or by night, they had dreamed of this as the land
they must conquer for their homes. Now they had conquered it already; and
now this was the town that had been built there, with its wide streets under
big trees of the primeval woods; with a long stretch of turf on one side of
the stream for a town common; with inns and taverns in the style of those of
country England or of Virginia in the reign of George the Third; with shops
displaying the costliest merchandise of Philadelphia; with rude dwellings of
logs now giving way to others of frame and of brick; and, stretching away
from the town toward the encompassing wilderness, orderly gardens and
orchards now pink with the blossom of the peach, and fields of young maize
and wheat and flax and hemp.

As the mighty stream of migration of the Anglo-Saxon race had burst through
the jagged channels of the Alleghanies and rushed onward to the unknown,
illimitable West, it was this little town that had received one of the main
streams, whence it flowed more gently dispersed over the rich lands of the
newly created State, or passed on to the Ohio and the southern fringes of
the Lakes. It was this that received also a vast return current of the
fearful, the disappointed, the weak, as they recoiled from the awful
frontier of backwood life and resought the peaceful Atlantic seaboard--one
of the defeated Anglo-Saxon armies of civilization.

These two far-clashing tides of the aroused, migrating race--the one flowing
westward, the other ebbing eastward--John Gray found himself noting with
deep interest as he moved through the town that afternoon a hundred years
ago; and not less keenly the unlike groups and characters thrown