yellow wheat, silver-gray oats, and rippling barley had fled at
the sight of his banner to the open sunny spaces as though to make
their last stand an indignant appeal that all might see. Even the
proud woodlands looked ragged and drooping, for here and there the
ruthless marauder had flanked one and driven a battalion into its
very heart, and here and there charred stumps told plainly how he
had overrun, destroyed, and ravished the virgin soil beneath. A
fuzzy little parasite was throttling the life of the Kentuckians'
hemp. A bewhiskered moralist in a far northern State would one day
try to drive the kings of his racing-stable to the plough. A
meddling band of fanatical teetotalers would overthrow his merry
monarch, King Barleycorn, and the harassed son of the Blue-grass,
whether he would or not, must turn to the new pretender who was in
the Kentuckians' midst, uninvited and self-throned.

And with King Tobacco were coming his own human vassals that were
to prove a new social discord in the land--up from the river-
bottoms of the Ohio and down from the foot-hills of the
Cumberland--to plant, worm, tend, and fit those yellow robes to be
stuffed into the mouth of the world and spat back again into the
helpless face of the earth. And these vassals were supplanting
native humanity as the plant was supplanting the native products
of the soil. And with them and the new king were due in time a
train of evils to that native humanity, creating disaffection,
dividing households against themselves, and threatening with ruin
the lordly social structure itself.

But, for all this, the land that early September morning was a
land of peace and plenty, and in field, meadow, and woodland the
most foreign note of the landscape was a spot of crimson in the