and emptied each year, brought riches and dignity and power to this
man of the soil.

Back when the state was young, his forefathers had fared westward
from the tide-water reaches of Virginia, coming at length to the
rich, unbroken region along the river with the harsh Indian name,
and there they built their cabins and huts on lands that had cost
them little more than a song and yet were of vast dimensions.
They were of English stock. (Another branch of the family, closely
related, remains English to this day, its men sitting sometime in
Parliament and always in the councils of the nation, far removed
in every way from the Windoms in the fertile valley once traversed
by the war-like redskins.) But these Windoms of the valley were no
longer English. There had been six generations of them, and those
of the first two fought under General Washington against the
red-coats and the Hessians in the War of '76.

David Windom, of the fourth generation, went to England for a
wife, however,--a girl he had met on the locally celebrated trip
to Europe in the early seventies. For years he was known from one
end of the county to the other as "the man who has been across the
Atlantic Ocean." The dauntless English bride had come unafraid to
a land she had been taught to regard as wild, peopled by savages
and overrun by ravenous beasts, and she had found it populated
instead by the gentlest sort of men and equally gentle beasts.

She did a great deal for David Windom. He was a proud man
and ambitious. He saw the wisdom of her teachings and he followed
them, not reluctantly but with a fierce desire to refine what God
had given him in the shape of raw material: a good brain, a sturdy