at time I had not so much as laid eyes on my cousin
and dearest friend, her son. I searched New Orleans for him in vain, and
learned too late that he had taken passage on a packet which had dropped
down the river the next morning, bound for Charleston and New York.

I have an instinct that this is not the place to relate in detail what
occurred to me before leaving New Orleans. Suffice it to say that I
made my way back through the swamps, the forests, the cane-brakes of the
Indian country, along the Natchez trail to Nashville, across the barrens
to Harrodstown in Kentucky, where I spent a week in that cabin which had
so long been for me a haven of refuge. Dear Polly Ann! She hugged me as
though I were still the waif whom she had mothered, and wept over
the little presents which I had brought the children. Harrodstown was
changed, new cabins and new faces met me at every turn, and Tom, more
disgruntled than ever, had gone a-hunting with Mr. Boone far into the
wilderness.

I went back to Louisville to take up once more the struggle for
practice, and I do not intend to charge so much as a page with what may
be called the even tenor of my life. I was not a man to get into trouble
on my own account. Louisville grew amazingly; white frame houses were
built, and even brick ones. And ere Kentucky became a State, in 1792, I
had gone as delegate to more than one of the Danville Conventions.

Among the nations, as you know, a storm raged, and the great swells from
that conflict threatened to set adrift and wreck the little republic but
newly launched. The noise of the tramping of great armies across the
Old World shook the New, and men in whom the love of fierce fighting was
born were stirred to quarrel among themselves. The Rights of Man! How
many wrongs have been done under that clause! The Bastille stormed; the
Swiss Guard slaughtered; the Reign of Terror, with its daily procession
of tumbrels through the streets of Paris; the murder of that amiable
and well-meaning gentleman who did his best to atone for the sins of his
ancestors; the fearful months of waiting suffered by his Queen before
she, too, went to her death. Often as I lighted my candle of an evening
in my little room to read of these things so far away, I would drop my
Kentucky Gazette to think of a woman whose face I remembered, to wonder
sadly whether Helene de St. Gre were among the lists. In her, I was
sure, was personified that courage for which her order will