my back recovering from the
fever,--the fever for which Mrs. Temple was to blame. Yet I bore her no
malice. And many other thoughts I had, probing back into childhood
memories for the solving of problems there.

"I knowed ye come of gentlefolks, Davy," Polly Ann had said when we
talked together.

So I was first cousin to Nick, and nephew to that selfish gentleman, Mr.
Temple, in whose affectionate care I had been left in Charlestown by my
father. And my father? Who had he been? I remembered the speech that
he had used and taught me, and how his neighbors had dubbed him
"aristocrat." But Mrs. Temple was gone, and it was not in likelihood
that I should ever see her more.

CHAPTER III

WE GO TO DANVILLE

Two years went by, two uneventful years for me, two mighty years for
Kentucky. Westward rolled the tide of emigrants to change her character,
but to swell her power. Towns and settlements sprang up in a season and
flourished, and a man could scarce keep pace with the growth of them.
Doctors came, and ministers, and lawyers; generals and majors, and
captains and subalterns of the Revolution, to till their grants and to
found families. There were gentry, too, from the tide-waters, come to
retrieve the fortunes which they had lost by their patriotism. There
were storekeepers like Mr. Scarlett, adventurers and ne'er-do-weels who
hoped to start with a clean slate, and a host of lazy vagrants who
thought to scratch the soil and find abundance.

I must not forget how, at the age of seventeen, I became a landowner,
thanks to my name being on the roll of Colonel Clark's regiment. For, in
a spirit of munificence, the Assembly of the Commonwealth of Virginia had
awarded to every private in that regiment one hundred and eight acres of
land on the Ohio River, north of the Falls. Sergeant Thomas McChesney,
as a reward for his services in one of the severest campaigns in history,
received a grant of two hundred and sixteen acres! You who will may look
at the plat made by William Clark, Surveyor for the Board of
Commissioners, and find sixteen acres marked for Thomas McChesney in
Section 169, and two hundred more in Section 3. Section 3 fronted the
Ohio some distance above Bear Grass Creek, and was, of course, on the
Illinois shore. As for my own plots, some miles in the interior, I never
saw them. But I own them to this day.

I mention these things as bearing on the story of my life, with which I
must get on. And, therefore