n
fluttered folk and wild."

Boone drew a long breath of silent tribute and homage. It pleased him to
think, too, that not all of the magic-makers came from beyond the hills.
Happy was one of them. In these years she had developed until one might
not have guessed that she, too, had not come from the source of a
gentler rearing. She had met the representative of her district as an
old friend, but in no glance or inflection was there a hint that between
them lay any buried memory.

"They sent for you to come here," the girl told him, as she showed him
over the redeemed grounds, "because we want your help. They didn't know
that we were old friends, and I didn't mention it. You see what we are
trying to do here, but we need roads. A country without highways is a
house without windows. That is where you can help us. We're very poor,
you know."

"You're making the country very rich," he answered gravely, and he
returned to Frankfort with the affairs of that school near his heart.

That week-end he went to Louisville, and as he sat at Anne's right at a
dinner party a mood of romanticism laid its glamour upon his thoughts.
Tonight he could seem to step back across the years and stand looking
into the hungry, discontented eyes of a boy in hodden-gray perched on
the topmost rail of a rotting fence. It seemed incredible that that boy
had been himself. To that boy, all life except the hard realities of a
pioneer people had been an untried thing of formless dream tissue.

And tonight he sat here! In many respects it was just such a table and
just such a company as everywhere reflected the niceties of civilized
society, yet in the little intimate things it was distinctive.

In the voices, the colloquialisms--the very colour of thought--spoke the
spirit of the South--not the Old South, perhaps, yet the offspring of a
mother who had passed on much of herself.

From the log cabin to this dinner seemed to him the measure of his
progress thus far. It was as though with seven-league boots he had
crossed the centuries!

Behind him lay a boyhood that belonged to the little sectionalism of the
backwoods settlement. Here was the widening circle of the life evolved
out of it, yet still a circle of sectionalism. What lay beyond?

In his imagination the young Kentuckian saw the dome of the capitol at
Washington, the nerve centre of the nation, where functioned the broad
affairs of statecraft. Above the dome an afterglow hung in the sky,