ass. But the warriors must not
perish of thirst. So, with a prayer, a tear, a final embrace, the
little women marched out through the gates to the spring, in the very
teeth of death, and brought back water in their wooden dinner-buckets.

Or, when the boys would become men with contests of running, and
pitching quoits, and wrestling, the girls would play wives and have a
quilting in a house of green alder-bushes, or be capped and wrinkled
grandmothers sitting beside imaginary spinning-wheels and smoking
imaginary pipes.

Sometimes it was not Indian warfare, but civil strife. For one morning
as many as three Daniel Boones appeared on the playground at the same
moment; and at once there was a fierce battle to ascertain which was
the genuine Daniel. This being decided, the spurious Daniels submitted
to be the one Simon Kenton, the other General George Rogers Clarke.

This was to be a great day for what he called his class in history.
Thirteen years before, and forty miles away, had occurred the most
dreadful of all the battles--the disaster of the Blue Licks; and in
town were many mothers who yet wept for sons, widows who yet dreamed
of young husbands, fallen that beautiful August day beneath the oaks
and cedars, or floating down the red-dyed river.

It was this that he had promised to tell them at noon; and a little
after twelve o'clock he was standing with them on the bank of the Town
Fork, in order to give vividness to his description. This stream flows
unseen beneath the streets of the city [Lexington] now, and with
scarce current enough to wash out its grimy channels; but then it
flashed broad and clear through the long valley which formed the town
common--a valley of scattered houses with orchards and corn-fields and
patches of cane.

A fine poetic picture he formed as he stood there amid their eager
upturned faces, bare-headed under the cool brilliant sky of May, and
reciting to them, as a prose-minstrel of the wilderness, the deeds of
their fathers.

This Town Fork of the Elkhorn, he said, must represent the Licking
River. On that side were the Indians; on this, the pioneers, a crowd
of foot and horse. There stretched the ridge of rocks, made bare by
the stamping of the buffalo; here was the clay they licked for salt.
In that direction headed the two ravines in which Boone had feared an
ambuscade. And thus variously having made ready for battle, and
looking down for a moment into the eyes of a freckly impetu