e York spring.

Down by the spring I met the little mother bringing a tin bucket to the
stone milk-house which nature had built. Her slender, drooping figure,
capped by the sunbonnet she always wore, reached just to the shoulder of
her son, as he placed his arm protectingly about her.

I asked if she were not proud of that boy of hers.

"Yes," she answered, with pride in every line of her sweet though
wrinkled face, "I am proud of all of them--all of my eight boys!"

II
A "Long Hunter" Comes to the Valley

The "Valley of the Three Forks o' the Wolf" is more than a fertile space
between two mountain ranges. It is a rectangular basin of verdure and
beauty in the glow of a Southern sun, around which seven mountains have
grown to their maturity. Generously, for uncounted years, this family of
the hills has given to the valley the surplus products of their timbered
slopes, and the Wolf River has gone through the valley distributing the
wealth the mountains brought in, brightening and adding touches of
beauty here and there, ever singing as she came down to her daily task.
The mountains and the river have worked unceasingly together to make the
spot a place of comfort and beauty.

On the bare rock-shoulder of one of these mountains, in the closing
years of the eighteenth century, stood one of the last of the "Long
Hunters," that race of stout-hearted, sturdy-legged men who when the
Atlantic Coast was dotted with sparsely settled British colonies climbed
the mountains and went down the western slopes on the long hunts in the
unknown land that lay below. They were the pioneers of the pioneers, who
in their wanderings found a spot rich in game, in nuts and soil--such a
home as they had wished--and they beckoned back for their families and
their friends.

The figure upon the rock-ledge rested upon a long, muzzle-loading,
flint-lock rifle as he looked out over the valley. His legs were wrapped
in crudely tanned hides made from game he had killed. His cap was of
coon-skin. His search for adventure and game had carried him across the
crest of the Cumberlands and along many weary, lonely miles of the
western wooded slopes of those mountains. Years afterward he is known to
have said that the view from the crag that day was the most appealing in
its calmness and its beauty that he had seen upon his hunts.

Below him stretched a grove of trees. Their waving tops told of their
size and to his trained woodsman's eye the qui