222 RIVERBY 



am very apt to take a farmer's view of a country. 

 That long line of toiling and thrifty yeomen back 

 of me seems to have bequeathed something to my 

 blood that makes me respond very quickly to a fer- 

 tile and well-kept landscape, 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 

 unhappy; he saw hardly a rood of land that he 

 would like to call his own. But that remnant of 

 the wild man of the woods, which most of us still 

 carry, saw much that delighted him, especially down 

 the New River, where the rocks and the waters, and 

 the steep forest-clad mountains were as wild and as 

 savage as anything he had known in his early Dar- 

 winian 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, geologically 

 speaking, and the top-soil did not seem to have had 

 time to become deepened and enriched by vegetable 

 mould. Near sundown, as I glanced out of the win- 



