and press on till they found a field by
the way. As soon as they began to pass it, over into their faces would
be wafted the clean, cooling, velvet-soft, balsam breath of the hemp.
The carriage would stop, and Gabriella, standing up and facing the
field, would fill her lungs again and again, smiling at her grandmother
for approval. Then she would take her seat and say quietly:--

"Turn round, Tom, and drive back. I have smelt it enough."

These drives alone with her grandmother were for spring and early
summer only. Full summer brought up from their plantations in
Louisiana, Arkansas, and Mississippi, her uncles and the wives and
children of some of them. All the bedrooms in the big house were
filled, and Gabriella was nearly lost in the multitude, she being the
only child of the only daughter of her grandmother. And now what happy
times there were. The silks, and satins, and laces! The plate, the
gold, the cut glass! The dinners, the music, the laughter, the wines!

Later, some of her uncles' families might travel on with their servants
to watering places farther north. But in September all were back again
under the one broad Kentucky roof, stopping for the beautiful Lexington
fair, then celebrated all over the land; and for the races--those days
of the thoroughbred only; and until frost fall should make it safe to
return to the swamps and bayous, loved by the yellow fever.

When all were departed, sometimes her grandmother, closing the house
for the winter, would follow one of her sons to his plantation; thence
later proceeding to New Orleans, at that time the most brilliant of
American capitals; and so Gabriella would see the Father of Waters, and
the things that happened in the floating palaces of the Mississippi;
see the social life of the ancient French and Spanish city.

All that could be most luxurious and splendid in Kentucky during those
last deep, rich years of the old social order, was Gabriella's: the
extravagance, the gayety, the pride, the lovely manners, the
selfishness and cruelty in its terrible, unconscious, and narrow way,
the false ideals, the aristocratic virtues. Then it was that,
overspreading land and people, lay the full autumn of that sowing,
which had moved silently on its way toward its fateful fruits for over
fifty years. Everything was ripe, sweet, mellow, dropping, turning
rotten.

O ye who have young children, if possible give them happy memories!
Fill their earliest years with br