A TASTE OF KENTUCKY BLUE-GRASS 223 



country. That long line of toiling and thrifty 

 yoemen back of me seems to have bequeathed 

 something to my blood that makes me respond 

 very quickly to a fertile and well-kept land- 

 scape, and that, on the other hand, makes me 

 equally discontented in a poor, shabby one. 

 All the way from Washington till I struck the 

 heart of Kentucky, the farmer in me was un- 

 happy; he saw hardly a rood of land that he 

 would like to call his own. But that remnant 

 of the wild man of tlie woods, which most of 

 us still carry, saw much that delighted him, 

 especially down the New Eiver, where the 

 rocks and the waters, and the steep forest- clad 

 mountains were as wild and as savage as any- 

 thing he had known in his early Darwinian 

 ages. But when we emerged upon the banks 

 of the Great Kanawha, the man of the woods 

 lost his interest and the man of the fields saw 

 little that was comforting. 



When we cross the line into Kentucky, I 

 said, we shall see a change. But no, we did 

 not. The farmer still groaned in spirit; no 

 thrifty farms, no substantial homes, no neat 

 villages, no good roads anywhere, but squalor 

 and sterility on every hand. Nearly all the 

 afternoon we rode through a country like the 

 poorer parts of New England, unredeemed by 

 anything like New England thrift. It was a 

 country of coal, a very new country, geologi- 

 cally speaking, and the top-soil did not seem to 

 have had time to become deepened and enriched 

 by vegetable mould. Near sundown, as I 



