n
Breck, her grandfather, undaunted by sea or wilderness, had come
straight from Belfast to the little log settlement by the great river
that mirrored then the mantle of primeval forest on the hills. So much
for chance. He kept a store with a side porch and square-paned windows,
where hams and sides of bacon and sugar loaves in blue glazed paper hung
beside ploughs and calico prints, barrels of flour, of molasses and rum,
all of which had been somehow marvellously transported over the passes
of those forbidding mountains,--passes we blithely thread to-day in
dining cars and compartment sleepers. Behind the store were moored the
barges that floated down on the swift current to the Ohio, carrying
goods to even remoter settlements in the western wilderness.

Benjamin, in addition to his emigrant's leather box, brought with him
some of that pigment that was to dye the locality for generations a
deep blue. I refer, of course, to his Presbyterianism. And in order the
better to ensure to his progeny the fastness of this dye, he married
the granddaughter of a famous divine, celebrated in the annals of New
England,--no doubt with some injustice,--as a staunch advocate on the
doctrine of infant damnation. My cousin Robert Breck had old Benjamin's
portrait, which has since gone to the Kinley's. Heaven knows who painted
it, though no great art were needed to suggest on canvas the tough
fabric of that sitter, who was more Irish than Scotch. The heavy
stick he holds might, with a slight stretch of the imagination, be a
blackthorn; his head looks capable of withstanding many blows; his hand
of giving many. And, as I gazed the other day at this picture hanging in
the shabby suburban parlour, I could only contrast him with his anaemic
descendants who possessed the likeness. Between the children of poor
Mary Kinley,--Cousin Robert's daughter, and the hardy stock of the old
country there is a gap indeed!

Benjamin Breck made the foundation of a fortune. It was his son who
built on the Second Bank the wide, corniced mansion in which to house
comfortably his eight children. There, two tiers above the river, lived
my paternal grandfather, Dr. Paret, the Breck's physician and friend;
the Durretts and the Hambletons, iron-masters; the Hollisters, Sherwins,
the McAlerys and Ewanses,--Breck connections,--the Willetts and Ogilvys;
in short, everyone of importance in the days between the 'thirties and
the Civil War. Theirs were generous houses su