through the dark and hitherto impervious thickets. The city sprang
up beside the river, while hamlets, filled with active hope and
cheerful industry, crowded upon the verdant hill-side, and clustered
among innumerable valleys Grace began to seek out the homes of
toil, and taste supplied their decorations. A purer form of religion
hallowed the forest-homes of the red-man, while expelling for ever
the rude divinities of his worship; and throughout the land, an
advent of moral loveliness seemed approaching, not less grateful
to the affections and the mind, than was the beauty of the infant
April, to the eye and the heart of the wanderer.

But something was still wanting to complete the harmonies of nature,
in the scene upon which we are about to enter. Though the savage
had for ever departed from its limits, the blessings of a perfect
civilization were not yet secured to the new and flourishing regions
of Kentucky. Its morals were still in that fermenting condition
which invariably distinguishes the settlement of every new country
by a various and foreign people. At the distant period of which we
write, the population of Kentucky had not yet become sufficiently
stationary to have made their domestic gods secure, or to have
fixed the proper lines and limits regulating social intercourse
and attaching precise standards to human conduct. The habits and
passions of the first settlers--those fearless pioneers who had
struggled foot to foot with the Indian, and lived in a kindred
state of barbarity with him, had not yet ceased to have influence
over the numerous race which followed them. That moral amalgam
which we call society, and which recognises a mutual and perfectly
equal condition of dependence, and a common necessity, as the great
cementing principles of the human family, had not yet taken place;
and it was still too much the custom, in that otherwise lovely