A TASTE OF KENTUCKY BLUE-GRASS 231 



it was so easy to fancy knights and ladies riding. 

 The land has not the mellow, time-enriched look of 

 England; it could not have it under our harder, 

 fiercer climate; but it has a sense of breadth and a 

 roominess which one never sees in England except 

 in the great royal parks. 



The fences are mainly posts and rails, which fall a 

 little short of giving the look of permanence which 

 a hedge or a wall and dike afford. 



The Kentuckians have an unhandsome way of 

 treating their forests when they want to get rid of 

 them; they girdle the trees and let them die, in- 

 stead of cutting them down at once. A girdled tree 

 dies hard ; the struggle is painful to look upon ; inch 

 by inch, leaf by leaf, it yields, and the agony is pro- 

 tracted nearly through the whole season. The land 

 looked accursed when its noble trees were all dying 

 or had died, as if smitten by a plague. One hardly 

 expected to see grass or grain growing upon it. The 

 girdled trees stand for years, their gaunt skeletons 

 blistering in the sun or blackening in the rain. 

 Through southern Indiana and Illinois I noticed this 

 same lazy, ugly custom of getting rid of the trees. 



The most noticeable want of the blue-grass region 

 is water. The streams bore underground through 

 the limestone rock so readily that they rarely come 

 to the surface. With plenty of sparkling streams 

 and rivers like New England, it would indeed be 

 a land of infinite attractions. The most unsightly 

 feature the country afforded was the numerous shal- 

 low basins, scooped out of the soil and filled with 



