were of the purest American stock, and spoke the best English in the
world; they enjoyed obviously the greatest sum of happiness, and had
incontestibly the lowest death rate and divorce rate in the State. The
growth of the place was normal and healthy; it had increased only to five
thousand during the time he had known it, which was almost an ideal
figure for a county-town. There was a higher average of intelligence
than in any other place of its size, and a wider and evener diffusion of
prosperity. Its record in the civil war was less brilliant, perhaps,
than that of some other localities, but it was fully up to the general
Ohio level, which was the high-water mark of the national achievement in
the greatest war of the greatest people under the sun. It, was Kenton's
pride and glory that he had been a part of the finest army known in
history. He believed that the men who made history ought to write it,
and in his first Commemoration-Day oration he urged his companions in
arms to set down everything they could remember of their soldiering, and
to save the letters they had written home, so that they might each
contribute to a collective autobiography of the regiment. It was only in
this way, he held, that the intensely personal character of the struggle
could be recorded. He had felt his way to the fact that every battle is
essentially episodical, very campaign a sum of fortuities; and it was not
strange that he should suppose, with his want of perspective, that this
universal fact was purely national and American. His zeal made him the
repository of a vast mass of material which he could not have refused to
keep for the soldiers who brought it to him, more or less in a humorous
indulgence of his whim. But he even offered to receive it, and in a
community where everything took the complexion of a joke, he came to be
affectionately regarded as a crank on that point; the shabbily aging
veterans, whom he pursued to their workbenches and cornfields, for, the
documents of the regimental history, liked to ask the colonel if he had
brought his gun. They, always give him the title with which he had been