Constance Lindsay Skinner

“ But his Welsh mother's legacy is seen in the black hair that hangs long and loose in the hunter's fashion to his shoulders. We can think of Daniel Boone only as exhilarated by this plunge into the Wild. He sees ahead—the days of his great explorations and warfare, the discovery of Kentucky? Not at all. This is a boy of sixteen in love with his rifle. He looks ahead to 30 vistas of forest filled with deer and to skies clouded with flocks of wild turkeys. In that dream there is happiness enough for Daniel Boone. ”

“ She lingered only a moment or two among the dahlias. Beyond their haughty glory lay the rose garden, a radiant and random half acre spilling forth every tint and perfume known to the rose family. Here Rosamond’s shears went to work busily. She found delight in the task, for she hummed again the little minuet theme which she had recomposed into this day’s salutation to herself.
When one is young, not only with the fearless years but with the brave desires of youth and eager for fairy tale happenings, so that every other sentence begins with “I wonder!” ”

“ This savage inheritance had decreed that Kentucky should be a dark and bloody ground, fostering no life but that of four-footed beasts, its fertile sod never to stir with the green push of the corn. And so the white men who went into Kentucky to build and to plant went as warriors go, and for every cabin they erected they battled as warriors to hold a fort. ”

“ She had decided to spend the afternoon hours in a nook she knew by the river, not a stone’s throw from the bell tower. It was the loveliest spot in the valley and, unseen, one might watch the three roads that crossed one another at the tower. She needed a parasol, and ignoring the four black ones—one with lavender flowers—and the two black and white ones—the latest with a white chiffon frill—which, in their appointed order, had screened her grieved countenance during the last four years—she selected a shot silk of a grass green, its brightness tempered with silver gray. ”

“ The red peril, indeed, influenced every side of frontier life. The bands of women and children at the harvestings, the log rollings, and the house raisings, were not there merely to lighten the men's work by their laughter and love-making. It was not safe for them to remain in the cabins, for, to the Indian, the cabin thus boldly thrust upon his immemorial hunting grounds was only a secondary evil; the greater evil was the white man's family, bespeaking the increase of the dreaded palefaces. ”

“ He had made himself equally free of the house and grounds of Villa Rose. Though, before others, his manner to the Villa’s lady was formal, he expressed, in private, the intimate affection of a brother. Her widowhood appealed to his chivalry; and her black ribbons, he said, put out the sun for him; how had the anomaly of grief entered Roseborough and how had it attached itself to her?
“In me you have always a brother, a friend, a protector,” he would say. “What privilege of manhood is more to be envied than the right to shelter women?” ”

“ The great pile of the Appalachian peaks was not the only barrier which held back the settler with his plough and his rifle from following the trader's tinkling caravans into the valleys beyond. Over the hills the French were lords of the land. The frontiersman had already felt their enmity through the torch and tomahawk of their savage allies. By his own strength alone he could not cope with the power entrenched beyond the hills ”

“ Mabel’s tone was delicately unpleasant. It angered her aunt.
“Not at all! I doubt if there is a woman in Roseborough who plays a better hand.”
In turning to make her speech more impressive and to give Miss Crewe a broadside, as it were, of her displeasure, she had a full view of the verandah, and was in the nick of time to see a swarthy, black-whiskered face, topped by a soft, black felt hat, slowly raised over the verandah rail. She panted twice from terror’s cold shock; then screamed with all her might. The apparition disappeared.
“Eh? What?” Dr. Wells looked up, jerkily, from his cards. ”

“ But to these Ulster immigrants such a choice was no choice at all. They knew themselves strong men, who had made the most of opportunity despite almost superhuman obstacles. The drumming of their feet along the banks of the Shenandoah, or up the rivers from Charleston, and on through the broad sweep of the Yadkin Valley, was a conquering people's challenge to the Wilderness which lay sleeping like an unready sentinel at the gates of their Future. ”

“ Mearely but because Mrs. Lee instinctively greeted all the world lovingly. Under the white hair and dainty, white lace cap, the kind eyes, which had seen seventy years of life—with its human sun and shadow—go by, would beam out of the delicately wrinkled face with a delight in the flowers’ beauty and fragrance as spontaneous and young as youth itself—the spirit which37 discounts time because its habitation is with the good and the eternal. ”

“ The battle, which continued from dawn until an hour before sunset, was the bloodiest in Virginia's long series of Indian wars. The frontiersmen fought as such men ever fought—with the daring, bravery, swiftness of attack, and skill in taking cover which were the tactics of their day, even as at a later time many of these same men fought at King's Mountain and in Illinois the battles that did so much to turn the tide in the Revolution. ”

“ The aged pensioner, who collected the tow-path tolls, rang the strokes of the hour on this bell from six A.M. until six P.M., and, so closely did the low, curving hills advance to smile upon each other from both sides of the running water that they made a channel for the sound—like a great, twisted, golden horn—so that the bell-tones, rung out at the crossroads, were heard at Roseborough and at Poplars Vale and even rolled their echoes, when the wind was kind, upon the town of Trenton Waters. ”

“ With France expelled and the Indians deprived 89 of their white allies, the westward path lay open to the pioneers, even though the red man himself would rise again and again in vain endeavor to bar the way. So a new era begins, the era of exploration for definite purpose, the era of commonwealth building. In entering on it, we part with the earliest pioneer—the trader, who first opened the road for both the lone home seeker and the great land company. He dwindles now to the mere barterer and so—save for a few chance glimpses—slips out of sight, for his brave days as Imperial Scout are done. ”

“ It is a miracle of beauty to look at—and, to eat! Who made it? I ask, because the cooker of that cake has the soul of an artist. I wish to spend my days in the shadow of her wing.”
“I made it.” She blushed, happily, under the royal praise.
“You? Put a raisin in your diadem, as its central jewel!”
“You will not mock at the ‘museum’ any more when I tell you that I found the recipe for that cake in an old parchment. The Countess of Mountjoye invented the cake first in 1715 for the Prince of Paradis: and history says she was the only one of his sweethearts who never lost his affection. ”

“ Could a lengthier narrative, even if enriched with literary art and fancy, bring before us more vividly than do the simple entries of Donelson's log the spirit of the men and the women who won the West? If so little personal detail is recorded of the pioneer men of that day that we must deduce what they were from what they did, what do we know of their unfailing comrades, the pioneer women? Only that they were there and that they shared in every test of courage and endurance, save the march of troops and the hunt. ”

“ What higher compliment could a woman desire than to be regarded by her husband purely as an art object? And I agreed—at first. I thought that was finer than just love—the love of farm lads and lasses. But, oh sir, the farm lads and lasses know something more precious than any treasure that has ever come into Villa Rose. Everybody in Roseborough said that the butter-maker’s daughter married you from ambition, but it wasn’t only ambition. ”

“ But if I could compose it I would call it ‘Rosamond.’”
“And dedicate it to me as if I were a royal highness.”
He frowned.
“Not at all!” he asserted almost with violence. “I compose no masterpieces for royal highnesses. Royal highnesses are ugly and artificial. But you! Fair Rosamond, they tell me—Miss Watts, I think it was, told me last—that you were born on the farm. ‘Farm product,’ she called you. Your mother....”
“Made and sold butter! I am sure all Roseborough has informed you of that!” ”

“ But Ferguson was a night marauder. The terror of his name, which grew among the Whigs of the Back Country until the wildest legends about his ferocity were current, was due chiefly to a habit he had of pouncing on his foes in the middle of the night and pulling them out of bed to give fight or die. It was generally both fight and die, for these dark adventures of his were particularly successful. Ferguson knew no neutrals or conscientious 202 objectors; any man who would not carry arms for the King was a traitor, and his life and goods were forfeit. ”