storms.

She never dreamt that she was an autocrat. When she noticed the universal and marked deference with which she was always treated, she thought it was because her father had been greatly respected, and her mother much beloved. It was quite natural that they should have been, Miss Judy thought in justification of her own shining by a reflected light. They had been justly prominent among the earliest settlers of the Pennyroyal Region, coming with their two infant daughters when Virginia—like a rich and generous queen—first began giving away the county of Kentucky, to the sons who had served her in the Revolution. Those were glorious days! To tell about them now sounds like a fairy tale. And yet they were sad days as well. For, great though the honor was and dazzling as was the reward, the officers so honored and rewarded must have known that the claiming of these lands meant lifelong exile for their families and for themselves. It would appear so, at all events, since few came who could stay nearer to civilization. The more fortunate ones stayed on in the old Virginia homes, content with holding cloudy titles to vast estates lying in this unknown wilderness of Kentucky; and with rearing there splendid castles in the air. So very cloudy, indeed, were many of these titles sent to Virginia by irresponsible agents, that litigation over them has only recently ceased in the local courts. Other officers were too poor to employ agents either good or bad, and these were consequently compelled to go in person, or to lose the grant of land. Among those reduced to this sore strait was Major John Bramwell, Miss Judy's father, who had won distinction as a captain of horse in the War for Independence. The home-coming found him utterly stranded. His small patrimony was long since spent, and his wife's ample fortune had shrunk to a mere pittance. He knew no means of earning a livelihood, knowing even less of the business of peace than most soldiers know. Hopelessly in debt, he knew not where to turn for relief; he knew not how to find bare bread for his family. The new home and the fresh start in the far-off county of Kentucky offered the only refuge. The young wife consented to go, as she would have consented to anything he wished or thought best; for she was the gentlest of women, and her faith in her husband was absolute. Thus it was that they gathered up the few fragments of the old happy life, and, taking their two little ones, rode sadly away into exile.

Sad indeed and heavy-hearted must have been all those first gentle-people who thus rode away from their old homes in Virginia over the Alleghanies into the wilderness of Kentucky, bearing tender little children in their arms. Miss Judy was much too young to remember that terrible journey, and Miss Sophia was only a baby, but they both knew all about it as soon as they were old enough to understand. They always wept when they heard how tired the delicate little mother was before the awful mountains were crossed—no matter how often they heard the story. They always smiled when they heard how glad all the weary pilgrims were to find a broad-horn waiting to bear the little band down the Ohio—though they heard the story over and over again. And they always followed the broad-horn with ever new interest, on and on down that long, long river through the primeval forest growing to the water's edge. Forest, forest, forest everywhere for hundreds of miles, till they came—with the travellers—almost to the vast mouth of the mighty river near which the Pennyroyal Region lies.

Miss Judy was not sure that it was called so when she entered it, an infant in her father's arms. She always thought it more likely that the whole of Kentucky may still have been known as The Dark and Bloody Ground, so great were still the sufferings of the brave men and braver women who were still giving their lives to redeem it from darkness and blood. But there never was the slightest doubt in Miss Judy's mind that these gentle-people coming now were braver than any who had come before—the bravest because they were the gentlest. It always made her own gentle heart beat, as if to strains of martial music, to be told in the little mother's soft voice of the leaving of the broad-horn's frail protection, and of the undaunted plunge into the depths of the wilderness. Yet there were dangers there to be met which courage itself must flee from. These fearless Virginians who did not shrink from facing savages, nor from encountering wild beasts, shrank and fled appalled before the more frightful dangers then lurking all along the banks of the lower Ohio. There, hidden under the beauty of the almost tropical vegetation, was the hideous rack of the fever and ague, waiting ready to torture the strength out of the men, the heart out of the women, and the very lives out of the children. There, beneath the noble trees and above the wide open spaces, rolling like gentle prairies—sunlit, flower filled, so richly covered with wild strawberries that the horses' hoofs were dyed rosy-red—there the deadly mystery of "the milk-sickness" was already spreading its invisible shroud over the whole beautiful land.

Fleeing from these perils more to be feared than the cruelest savages, and more to be dreaded than the fiercest wild beasts, the travellers went further into the heart of the wilderness, seeking the safety of higher ground; on and on, following the buffalo tracks which still traversed the country from end to end like broad, hard-beaten highways. One of these led them along a range of hills and into a fertile little valley, and it was here that the Virginians finally found a resting-place. It was here in this vale of rest, folded between these quiet hills, that the village of Oldfield grew out of that settlement, and here that it stands to-day scarcely altered from its beginning. Over the hills—there on the east where tender green of the crowning trees melts into the tenderer blue of the arching clouds—there still lies the untouched strip of broad brown earth, which the people of to-day call the Wilderness Road, just as those wandering Virginians called it when they first found it.

The forest crowded close to the valley, but the sun shone bright where the giant trees stood farther apart. Then the skies of Kentucky were as blue as the skies of Italy, just as they are now, so that the sunshine and the peace of the spot, and the pure air of the wooded hills, gave the wayfarers heart to believe themselves safe from the terrors of the Ohio. The homes which they built were all humble enough, the merest cabins of rough logs, since they had nothing else wherewith to build. Major Bramwell's house was no better than the rest. Like most of the settlers' cabins it had two low, large rooms with a closed passage between and a loft above. But it is the mistress who makes the real home,—wherever reared; the mere building of it has little to do with its making. And the softest little woman, who is neither very brilliant nor very wise, can work miracles for her husband and her children, no matter where her wings may rest upon the earth. This one, softer and less wise than many, not only made a real home of perfect refinement out of that log hut in the wilderness, but she reared her daughters—amongst white men rougher than the wild beasts, and near red men infinitely fiercer—as gently as any royal princesses were ever trained in any old palace for the gracing of courts.

It was easy enough to train Miss Judy, whose nature responded to exquisiteness as an æolian harp responds to the breeze. Miss Sophia was different, but the little mother did not live long enough to find it out. Perhaps no true mother ever lives long enough to find anything lacking in her child. Miss Sophia was standing on the threshold of womanhood, and Miss Judy had barely crossed it, when the little mother died, worn out by hardship and broken-hearted by exile, but cheerful and uncomplaining to the last, as such mothers always are.

Is it not amazing that a small, soft woman can leave such a large, hard void in the