BLUEGRASS ON LIMESTONE 97 



farms of 100 to 200 acres, milking cows and making 

 cheese, raising calves and pigs, selling the calves in the 

 fall to the big farmers of the "plains country." The 

 hill farmer pitied the plains farmer, who was stuck down 

 in mud and miasma, suffering plagues of chills and fever, 

 mosquitoes, green-headed flies and rattle-snakes. 



The long-headed, ambitious young men went to the 

 plains for all that. Some of them walked there. They 

 were men of mighty muscle and brain. They could do 

 anything that men needed to do in that land from break- 

 ing oxen to hewing out timbers to roof a home. These 

 men worked hard and lived long. Their sons, born in 

 prosperous times, worked very little. Their grandsons 

 have taken two ways of life part of them have deserted 

 the soil altogether, others have taken hold with about 

 as much energy as their grandfathers had and are re- 

 conquering the soil and learning to make two blades 

 of grass grow where but one grew in the palmiest days 

 of their grandsires. It is a land resting now on a foun- 

 dation of drain tiles. Not a farm but has miles of them. 

 Woodland Farm has as much as 16 miles of them just 

 at the edge of the plains country. It is a land threaded 

 now with stone roads. It is a land of homes, of old 

 trees, of memories that awaken pride, a land of beauty 

 and chivalry. They say the fairest women out of Ken- 

 tucky are in that land. It is a land of limestone and 

 sturdy-legged boys, .and of girls with the blush of the 

 rose in their cheeks and the glint of the sun in their hair. 



The methods of growing and fattening cattle in those 

 early days were delightfully simple. Calves did not fare 



