were back again under the one broad Kentucky roof, stopping for the
beautiful Lexington fair, then celebrated all over the land; and
for the races--those days of the thoroughbred only; and until frost
fall should make it safe to return to the swamps and bayous, loved
by the yellow fever.

When all were departed, sometimes her grandmother, closing the
house for the winter, would follow one of her sons to his
plantation; thence later proceeding to New Orleans, at that time
the most brilliant of American capitals; and so Gabriella would see
the Father of Waters, and the things that happened in the floating
palaces of the Mississippi; see the social life of the ancient
French and Spanish city.

All that could be most luxurious and splendid in Kentucky during
those last deep, rich years of the old social order, was
Gabriella's: the extravagance, the gayety, the pride, the lovely
manners, the selfishness and cruelty in its terrible, unconscious,
and narrow way, the false ideals, the aristocratic virtues. Then it
was that, overspreading land and people, lay the full autumn of
that sowing, which had moved silently on its way toward its fateful
fruits for over fifty years. Everything was ripe, sweet, mellow,
dropping, turning rotten.

O ye who have young children, if possible give them happy memories!
Fill their earliest years with bright pictures! A great historian
many centuries ago wrote it down that the first thing conquered in
battle are the eyes: the soldier flees from what he sees before
him. But so often in the world's fight we are defeated by what we
look back upon; we are whipped in the end by the things we saw in