hat led to that now far-away land of
civilization and safety.

During the balmy Indian summer, when the sharper lines of nature are
softened by the haze, some came to us from across the mountains to make
up for the deserters. From time to time a little group would straggle to
the gates of the station, weary and footsore, but overjoyed at the sight
of white faces again: the fathers walking ahead with watchful eyes, the
women and older children driving the horses, and the babies slung to the
pack in hickory withes. Nay, some of our best citizens came to Kentucky
swinging to the tail of a patient animal. The Indians were still abroad,
and in small war parties darted hither and thither with incredible
swiftness. And at night we would gather at the fire around our new
emigrants to listen to the stories they had to tell,--familiar stories to
all of us. Sometimes it had been the gobble of a wild turkey that had
lured to danger, again a wood-owl had cried strangely in the night.

Winter came, and passed--somehow. I cannot dwell here on the tediousness
of it, and the one bright spot it has left in my memory concerns Polly
Ann. Did man, woman, or child fall sick, it was Polly Ann who nursed
them. She had by nature the God-given gift of healing, knew by heart all
the simple remedies that backwoods lore had inherited from the north of
Ireland or borrowed from the Indians. Her sympathy and loving-kindness
did more than these, her never tiring and ever cheerful watchfulness.
She was deft, too, was Polly Ann, and spun from nettle bark many a cut of
linen that could scarce be told from flax. Before the sap began to run
again in the maples there was not a soul in Harrodstown who did not love
her, and I truly believe that most of them would have risked their lives
to do her bidding.

Then came the sugaring, the warm days and the freezing nights when the
earth stirs in her sleep and the taps drip from red sunrise to red
sunset. Old and young went to the camps, the women and children boiling
and graining, the squads of men posted in guards round about. And after
that the days flew so quickly that it seemed as if the woods had burst
suddenly into white flower, and it was spring again. And then--a joy to
be long remembered--I went on a hunting trip with Tom and Cowan and
three others where the Kentucky tumbles between its darkly wooded cliffs.
And other wonders of that strange land I saw then for the first time:
great licks, trampled down