larger tables stood against the wall. Upon them lay
volumes of the English classics, and a cluster of wax flowers under a
glass cover, that had seemed wonderful to Dick in his childhood.

But the room awed him no more, and he turned at once to the great
squares of light that faced each other from wall to wall.

A famous portrait painter had arisen at Lexington when the canebrake
was scarcely yet cleared away from the heart of Kentucky. His work
was astonishing to have come out of a country yet a wilderness, and a
century later he is ranked among the great painters. But it is said that
the best work he ever did is the pair of portraits that face each other
in the Mason home, and the other pair, the exact duplicates that face
each other in the same manner in the Kenton house.

Dick opened a shutter entirely, and the light of the white moon, white
like marble, streamed in. The sudden inpouring illuminated the room so
vividly that Dick's heart missed a beat. It seemed, for a minute, that
the two men in the portraits were stepping from the wall. Then his heart
beat steadily again and the color returned to his face. They had always
been there, those two portraits. Men had never lived more intensely than
they, and the artist, at the instant his genius was burning brightest,
had caught them in the moment of extraordinary concentration. Their
souls had looked through their eyes and his own soul looking through his
had met theirs.

Dick gazed at one and then at the other. There was his great
grandfather, Paul Cotter, a man of vision and inspiration, the greatest
scholar the west had ever produced, and there facing him was his comrade
of a long life-time, Henry Ware, the famous borderer, afterward the
great governor of the state. They had been painted in hunting suits of
deerskin, with the fringed borders and beaded moccasins, and raccoon
skin caps.

These were men, Dick's great grandfather and Harry's. An immense pride
that he was the great-grandson of one of them suddenly swelled up in his
bosom, and he was proud, too, that the descendants of the borderers, and
of the earlier borderers in the east, should show the same spirit and
stamina. No one could look upon the fields of Shiloh, and Manassas and
Antietam and say that any braver men ever lived.

He drew his chair into the middle of the room and sat and looked at them
a long time. His steady gazing and his own imaginative brain, keyed to
the point of excitement, brought