that could not be won by such a young
woman as that was hopelessly dead at the top and more hollow at the heart
than the old oak under whose boughs we sat.

* * * * *

Ashland is just a mile south of the courthouse. When Henry Clay used to
ride horseback between the town and his farm there were scarce a dozen
houses to pass on the way, but now the street is all built up, and is
smartly paved, and the trolley-line booms a noisy car to the sacred gates
every ten minutes.

Lexington was laid out in the year Seventeen Hundred Seventy-four, and the
intention was to name it in honor of Colonel Patterson, the founder, or of
Daniel Boone. But while the surveyors were doing their work, word came of
the battle of some British and certain embattled farmers, and the spirit
of freedom promptly declared that the town should be called Lexington.

Three years after the laying-out of Lexington, Henry Clay was born. He was
the son of a poor and obscure Baptist preacher who lived at "The Slashes,"
in Virginia. The boy never had any vivid recollection of his father, who
passed away when Henry was a mere child.

The mother had a hard time of it with her family of seven children, and if
kind neighbors had not aided, there would have been actual want. And
surely one can not blame the widow for "marrying for a home" when
opportunity offered. Only one out of that first family ever achieved
eminence, and the second brood is actually lost to us in oblivion.

Henry Clay was a graduate of the University of Hard Knocks; he also took
several post-graduate courses at the same institution. Very early in life
we see that he possessed the fine, eager, receptive spirit that absorbs
knowledge through the finger-tips; and the ability to think and to absorb
is all that even college can ever do for a man. I doubt whether college
would have helped Clay, and it might have dimmed the diamond luster of his
mind, and diluted that fine audacity which carried him on his way. In this
capacity to comprehend in the mass, Clay's character was essentially
feminine. We have Thoreau for authority that the intuition and the
sympathy found always in the saviors of the world are purely feminine
attributes--the legacy bequeathed from a mother who thirsted for better
things.

From a clerk in a country store to a bookkeeper, then a copyist for a
lawyer, a writer of letters for the neighborhood, a reader of law, and
next a lawyer, were easy a