by degrees the ever-increasing
beauty of the landscape wrought its effect upon his susceptible soul.

The houses along his route were finer than those of his own
neighbourhood and, being placed farther back, showed only a chimney, or
the white fluted column of a veranda every now and then beyond the
closely planted avenues of beech or maple trees. Sounding across the
fields came the voices of the darkies closing their day's tasks with
songs. Truly this Kentucky was a happy land in the days before the war,
and on this afternoon there were myriads of the soft, green growing
things toward which Ambrose's young spirit had yearned,--acres of corn
just creeping above the mould, and miles of tiny tobacco plants.

Then unexpectedly this character of landscape disappeared, and old Liza
trotted on to a hard white turnpike. The twilight was closing down, but
a toll-gate keeper showed himself a few yards ahead, and then a cluster
of small stores. Afterward there was nothing further to interest Ambrose
until he drove straight up to a big building surrounded by a high fence
and set in the middle of a grassless yard without the influence of a
tree or vine near it and where from the inside came the murmur of
children's voices hushed to a pathetic, uniform note.

The boy knew the place at once for a county orphan asylum, and being
what he was, reflected. In times past he had seen these same orphans led
through the streets of Pennyroyal, a dreary set of little human beings,
dressed alike and made to keep step like a chain gang. "Glory," he
whispered, "here am I running away from the fear of havin' to keep step
with _one_ person; what if I had been made to keep step with so many?"

The next moment brought him nearly opposite a woodpile, and there he
slowed up, for he thought that he heard a noise behind it sounding like
a scared sheep or lamb.

"Stop!" What looked like a child's figure instantly rose and ran toward
him. "Hide me!" she gasped; "oh, please be quick and don't ask
questions." And the girl clung so tightly to the spokes of the gig wheel
that had the young man driven on she must have been dragged like a slave
at his chariot.

But of course he did no such thing. "Hop in," he replied cheerfully.
Then, while the child crouched shivering and panting against his knee
under the thin laprobe, Ambrose whistled to indicate his entire lack of
concern in this latest adventure, and also to suggest that he rode
alone.

Pretty soon,