nbsp;locust trees; then walk out into the country
for an hour or more; then back to his room and more law until midnight by
the light of his tallow dip.
But this was not an ordinary day--being one that he had long waited for and
was destined never to forget. At dusk the evening before, the post-rider, so
tired that he had scarce strength of wind to blow his horn, had ridden into
town bringing the mail from Philadelphia; and in this mail there was GREat
news for him. It had kept him awake nearly all of the night before; it had
been uppermost in his mind the entire day in school. At the thought of it
now he thrust his watch into his pocket, pulled his hat resolutely over his
brow, and started toward Main Street, meaning to turn thence toward Cross
Street, now known as Broadway. On the outskirts of the town in that
direction lay the wilderness, undulating away for hundreds of miles like a
vast GREen robe with scarce a rift of human making.
He failed to urge his way through the throng as speedily as he may have
expected, being withheld at moments by passing acquaintances, and at others
pausing of his own choice to watch some spectacle of the street.
The feeling lay fresh upon him this afternoon that not many years back the
spot over which the town was spread had been but a hidden glade in the heart
of the beautiful, awful wilderness, with a bountiful spring bubbling up out
of the turf, and a stream winding away through the GREen, valley-bottom to
the bright, shady Elkhorn: a glade that for ages had been thronged by
stately-headed elk and heavy-headed bison, and therefore sought also by
unreckoned generations of soft-footed, hard eyed red hunters. Then had come
the beginning of the end when one summer day, toward sunset, a few tired,
rugged backwoodsmen of the Anglo-Saxon race, wandering fearless and far into
the wilderness from the eastern slopes of the Blue Ridge and the
Alleghanies, had made their camp by the margin of the spring; and always
afterwards, whether by day or by night, they had dreamed of this as the land
they must conquer for their homes. Now they had conquered it already; and
now this was the town that had been built there, with its wide streets under
big trees of the primeval woods; with a long stretch of turf on one side of
the stream for a town common; with inns and taverns in the style of those of
country England or of Virginia in the reign of George the Third; with shops
displaying the costliest merchandise of Philadelphia; with rude dwellings of
logs now giving way to others of frame and of brick; and, stretching away
from the town toward the encompassing wilderness, orderly gardens and
orchards now pink with the blossom of the peach, and fields of young maize
and wheat and flax and hemp.
As the mighty stream of migration of the Anglo-Saxon race had burst through
the jagged channels of the Alleghanies and rushed onward to the unknown,
illimitable West, it was this little town that had received one of the main
streams, whence it flowed more gently dispersed over the rich lands of the
newly created State, or passed on to the Ohio and the southern fringes of
the Lakes. It was this that received also a vast return current of the
fearful, the disappointed, the weak, as they recoiled from the awful
frontier of backwood life and resought the peaceful Atlantic seaboard--one
of the defeated Anglo-Saxon armies of civilization.
These two far-clashing tides of the aroused, migrating race--the one flowing
westward, the other ebbing eastward--John Gray found himself noting with
deep interest as he moved through the town that afternoon a hundred years
ago; and not less keenly the unlike groups and characters thrown
dramatically together upon this crowded stage of border history.
At one point his attention was arrested by the tearful voices of women and
the weeping of little children: a company of travellers with
pack-horses--one of the caravans across the desert of the Western woods--was
moving off to return by the Wilderness Road to the old abandoned homes in
Virginia and North Carolina. Farther on, his passage was blocked by a joyous
crowd that had gathered about another caravan newly arrived--not one
traveller having perished on the way. Seated on the roots of an oak were a
group of young backwoodsmen--swarthy, lean, tall, wild and reckless of
bearing--their long rifles propped against the tree or held fondly across
the knees; the gray smoke of their pipes mingling with the gray of their
jauntily worn raccoon-skin caps; the rifts of yellow sunlight blending with
the yellow of their huntingshirts and tunics; their knives and powder-horns
fastened in the belts that girt in their gaunt waists: the heroic youthful
sinew of the old border folk. One among them, larger and handsomer than the
others, had pleased his fancy by donning more nearly the Indian dress. His
breech-clout was of dappled fawn-skin; his long thigh boots of thin
deer-hide were open at the hips, leaving exposed the clear whiteness of his
flesh; below the knees they were ornamented by a scarlet fringe tipped with
the hoofs of fawns and the spurs of the wild turkey; and in his cap he wore
the intertwined wings of the hawk and the scarlet tanager.
Under anoth
