l thing,
when you are going to choose a place which you intend shall be your home
all the rest of your days. So the men and women sat late around the
fires and even boys of Henry's age were allowed to stay up, too, and
listen to the plans which all the grown people were making. Theirs had
not been a hard journey, only long and tedious--though neither to
Henry--and now that its end was at hand, work must be begun. They would
have homes to build and a living to get from the ground.

"Why, I could live under the trees; I wouldn't want a house," whispered
Henry to the guide, "and when I needed anything to eat, I'd kill game."

"A hunter might do that," replied Ross, "but we're not all hunters an'
only a few of us can be. Sometimes the game ain't standin' to be shot at
just when you want it, an' as for sleepin' under the trees it's all very
fine in summer, if it don't rain, but 'twould be just a least bit chilly
in winter when the big snows come as they do sometimes more'n a foot
deep. I'm a hunter myself, an' I've slept under trees an' in caves, an'
on the sheltered side of hills, but when the weather's cold give me for
true comfort a wooden floor an' a board roof. Then I'll bargain to sleep
to the king's taste."

But Henry was not wholly convinced. He felt in himself the power to meet
and overcome rain or cold or any other kind of weather.

Everybody in the camp, down to the tiniest child, was awake the next
morning by the time the first bar of gray in the east betokened the
coming day. Henry was fully dressed, and saw the sun rise in a
magnificent burst of red and gold over the valley that was to be their
valley. The whole camp beheld the spectacle. They had reached the crest
of the hill the evening before, too late to get a view and they were
full of the keenest curiosity.

It was now summer, but, having been a season of plenteous rains, grass
and foliage were of the most vivid and intense green. They were entering
one of the richest portions of Kentucky, and the untouched soil was
luxuriant with fertility. As a pioneer himself said: "All they had to do
was to tickle it with a hoe, and it laughed into a harvest." There was
the proof of its strength in the grass and the trees. Never before had
the travelers seen oaks and beeches of such girth or elms and hickories
of such height. The grass was high and thick and the canebrake was so
dense that passage through it seemed impossible. Down the center of the
valley, which