you if I
can."

She pressed my hand, and turned and went slowly into the house.

BOOK III

LOUISIANA

CHAPTER I

THE RIGHTS OF MAN

Were these things which follow to my thinking not extraordinary, I should
not write them down here, nor should I have presumed to skip nearly five
years of time. For indeed almost five years had gone by since the warm
summer night when I rode into New Orleans with Mrs. Temple. And in all
that 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 b