the banks of the Schuykill. More than forty years of a
wonderfully adventurous life had passed, since he a boy of fourteen had
accompanied his father in his removal from Reading, in Berk's County, to
North Carolina. Still the remarkable boy had left traces behind him
which were not yet obliterated.

He visited Reading, probably influenced by a faint hope of finding there
a home. A few of his former acquaintances were living, and many family
friends remained. By all he was received with the greatest kindness. But
the frontier settlement of log huts, and the majestic surrounding
forests filled with game, had entirely disappeared. Highly cultivated
farms, from which even the stumps of the forest had perished, extended
in all directions. Ambitious mansions adorned the hillsides, and all the
appliances of advancing civilization met the eye. There could be no home
here for Daniel Boone. Amid these strange scenes he felt as a stranger,
and his heart yearned again for the solitudes of the forest. He longed
to get beyond the reach of lawyers' offices, and court-houses, and land
speculators.

After a short visit he bade adieu forever to his friends upon the
Schuykill, and turned his steps again towards the setting sun. His
feelings had been too deeply wounded to allow him to think of remaining
a man without a home in Kentucky. Still the idea of leaving a region
endeared to him by so many memories must have been very painful. He
remembered vividly his long and painful journeys over the mountains,
through the wilderness untrodden by the foot of the white man; his
solitary exploration of the new Eden which he seemed to have found
there; the glowing accounts he had carried back to his friends of the
sunny skies, the salubrious clime, the fertile soil, and the majesty and
loveliness of the landscape; of mountain, valley, lake and river which
Providence had lavished with a prodigal hand in this "Garden of the
Lord."

One by one he had influenced his friends to emigrate, had led them to
their new homes, had protected them against the savages, and now when
Kentucky had become a prosperous State in the Union, containing thirty
thousand inhabitants, he was cast aside, and under the forms of law was
robbed of the few acres which he had cultivated as his own. His life
embittered by these reflections, and seeing nothing to attract him in
the wild and unknown regions beyond the Mississippi, Colonel Boone
turned sadly back to Virginia.

It