The pony
lifted his head to meet the caress, and then these two orphans of the
wilderness looked out dimly, wondering, over this wonderful new country
into which both were come, without knowing how or why or whence, through
no will or choice of their own.
That portion of Kentucky rises gently but steadily from the river, and
rolls gradually upward toward its eastern hills. On this October night
so close to the very beginning of the commonwealth, these terraced hills
were still covered with the primeval forest. Hill after hill, and forest
after forest, on and on and higher and higher, till the earth and the
heavens came together. Near the river on the natural open spaces, and
where earliest the clearings had been made, the boy could see the widely
scattered rude homes, the young orchards, and the new fields, which the
first Kentuckians had won from the wilderness, from the savage, from the
wild beast and the pestilence. Southward, and a long way off, lay the
great Cypress Swamp. The wavering sable line of its tree-tops spread a
pall across the starless horizon.
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