The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Kentucky Warbler, by James Lane Allen

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Title: The Kentucky Warbler

Author: James Lane Allen

Release Date: September 19, 2014 [eBook #46905]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1

***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE KENTUCKY WARBLER***

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THE KENTUCKY
WARBLER

"There He was—The Kentucky Warbler!"

THE KENTUCKY
WARBLER

BY

JAMES LANE ALLEN

WITH A
FRONTISPIECE IN COLOUR

GARDEN      CITY NEW YORK
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
1918

COPYRIGHT, 1918, BY
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, INCLUDING THAT OF
TRANSLATION INTO FOREIGN LANGUAGES,
INCLUDING THE SCANDINAVIAN

TO
THE YOUNG KENTUCKY
FOREST-LOVER

CONTENTS

THE KENTUCKY
WARBLER

I

THE HOME

ebster, along with thousands of other lusty forward-looking Kentucky children, went to the crowded public schools.

There every morning against his will but with the connivance of his parents he was made a prisoner, as it seemed to him, and for long hours held as such while many things disagreeable or unnecessary, some by one teacher and some by another, were forced into his head. Soon after they were forced in most of the things disappeared from the head. What became of them nobody knew: Webster didn't know and he didn't care. During the forcing-in process month by month and year by year he now and then picked up a pleasant idea for himself, some wonderful idea about great things on ahead in life or about the tempting world just outside school. He picked up such ideas with ease and eagerness and held on to them.

He lived in a small white-frame cottage which was rather new but already looked rather old. It stood in a small green yard, which was naturally very old but still looked young. The still-young yard and the already-ageing cottage were to be found—should anybody have tried to find them—on the rim of the city. If the architectural plan of the city had been mapped out as an open-air theatre, the cottage would have been a rear seat in the very last row at the very lowest price. The block was made up of