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But, in that same Italy, northward are the Apennines; and sometimes in travelling through these or through the Swiss glaciers where Nature measures all things on the scale of the sublime – sometimes as your eye is passing from snow peak to snow peak, suddenly away up on some mountain-side you will see a human hut; and standing in the door of that hut a single human being; and the thought may come to you that there, in the heart of that pygmy, may dwell sorrow that dwarfs the Alps.

The doctor's library had such a picture: it completed the story of the room, and it effaced everything else in it. In a somewhat darkened corner hung a framed photograph of his wife in her bridal dress made not long after their wedding. Once his photograph had hung beside it. The plaster where the nail had been driven in had either fallen out or it had been torn out. He never knew – he knew enough not to ask.

As for the photograph, there stood a young bride, looking into her future and trying to conceal from herself what she saw soon awaiting her: the life of a woman wedded but not loved. And there was recollection in the eyes too: that the man who had married her perhaps in the very breath of his wooing had wished she were another; that at the altar he had perhaps wished he were putting his ring upon another's hand; and that if there were to be children, he would always be wishing for them another mother.

The doctor sat there that morning trying to work at the books of the year. The rooms were comfortable; the children were away at the fireside of another man's wife; the servants did not dare disturb him; his horses waited in their stalls; it was the day on which he could begin to reap his golden harvest – a pleasant day for most men; but he could not see the blanks before him nor remember the names he filled in nor the figures that were for value received.

Because there lay open before him the Book of the Years.

And coming down toward him on the track of memory through this book was his life from boyhood to middle age: first the playing feet of the child that have no path as yet; then the straight path of the boy; then the winding road of youth; then the quickly widened road, so smooth, so easy, of a young man; and then the fixed deepening rut of middle age.

And now the rut of middle age had come to its forks: north fork and south fork; or east fork and west fork – he must choose.

Whoso cares to know where and how the doctor's life-path started and across what kind of country it had run until now, a middle-aged man, he sat there this day at the tragedy of its forking, may if he so choose follow the road by the chart of a narrative.

But let him remember that this narrative goes back into a society unlike that of to-day and into a Kentucky that has vanished. Back there are other manners, other customs, other types of men: a different light on the world altogether.

IV
THE BOOK OF THE YEARS

More than half a century ago, or during the decade of 1850 and 1860, when American life on the fertile plain of Kentucky attained its ripest flavor, there was living with great ease to himself and others on a large estate in one of the bluegrass counties a country gentleman and farmer who was nothing more: nothing more because that was enough. Being farmer took up much of his time, and being a gentleman took up the rest.

He one day observed that his prolific heels were beginning to be trodden upon by a group of stalwart sons nearing manhood; or, in the idiom of that picturesque soil, all thickly bunched in their race for the grand stand. According to the robust family life of that era and people, a year or less was often the interval between births; and a father, slanting his eyes upward to his oldest who had just reached twenty-one, might catch a glimpse of a fourth son smiling loyally at him from the top of the rank stalk of eighteen.

This juvenescent and prodigal sire clearly foreseeing, as many of his neighbors foresaw, the emancipation of the negroes and the downfall of the Southern feudal system and thus the downfall of the Kentucky gentleman of the feudal soil, could see no further. When those grapes then ripening went into the winepress of destiny, there would be no more like them: the stock would be cut down, a new vineyard would have to be planted; and what might become of his sons as laborers in that vineyard he knew not, though looking wistfully forth. Therefore he determined to store them away for their own safeguard among those ancestral professions alike of the Old and New World that are exempt from political vicissitude and dynastic changes.

Now it happened that among his friends he counted the great Dr. Benjamin Dudley, the illustrious Kentucky lithotomist at Lexington; and taking counsel of that learned and kindly man, he chose for his first-born stalwart – since the stalwart when invited to do so declined to choose it for himself – the profession of medicine; and having politely packed his trunk, he politely packed him with a polite body servant and a polite good-by off to a medical school, the best the Southern States then boasted – and the Southern States knew how to boast in those days.

But the colt that has been dragged to the water cannot be forced to drink; and the semi-docile son could not be made to introduce into his system his father's professional prescription. His presence at the medical school was evidence in its way that he had swallowed the prescription; but his conduct as a student showed that by his own will he had inhibited its action upon his vital parts.

In the year of finishing his course of lectures his father died; and upon returning home certificated as a doctor, he returned also as a young blood of independent fortune, independent future, and independent Feelings – the last of which, the Feelings, he regarded as by far the most important of the three. At the bottom of his trunk against the lining was his diploma, on the principle that we pack first what we shall need last.

The immediate use this golden youth made of his liberty and his Feelings was to take over into his control a share of the ancestral estate that fell to him under our American laws of partible inheritance; to build on it a low rambling manor house; and into this to convey his portion of the polished family silver and the polished family blacks. Soon afterward with no exertion on his part he married him a wife in the neighborhood; tore up his diploma as if to annihilate in his establishment the very recognition of disease; laid off a training-track; and proceeded to employ his languid energies in a fashion which his father had not favored for any of his sons – the breeding of Kentucky thoroughbreds.

Years passed. History came and went its thundering way, leaving the nation like a forest blasted with lightning and drenched with rain. The Kentucky gentleman of the feudal sort was gone, having disappeared in the clouds of that history which had swept him from the landscape.

The mild young Kentucky breeder mellowed to his middle years, winning and losing on the road as we all must, but with never a word about it one way or the other from him; early losing his wife and winning the makeshifts of widowerhood, entering so to speak upon its restrictions; losing his little daughter and winning a nephew whom he adopted and idolized; letting him run wild over the house, and then about the yard, and then about the farm, and then across boundary fences into other farms, and then into the towns, and then out into the world.

There were parts of his farm that looked like English downs; and on these fed Southdown sheep; for the Kentucky country gentleman of that period killed his own mutton. (He killed pretty much his own everything, even his own neighbors.) No saddle of mutton out of a public market house for him and for his groaning mahogany. And so it seemed well-nigh a romantic coincidence that the fatherless, motherless boy who came to play on these downs should have arrived there with the name of Downs Birney.

The Kentucky turfman, with his Southdown sheep and Durham cattle and White Berkshire hogs and thoroughbred horses and Blue-dorking chickens, was born, as may already have been observed, with that Southern indolence which occasionally equals the Oriental's; and as more time passed he settled into the deeper imperturbability of men who commit their destiny to fast horses. Apparently they early become so inoculated with hazard as to end in being immune to all excitement. As he could stroll over his farm without having to climb a hill, he had perhaps preferred to build him a low manor house so that he could lounge over it without having to take the trouble to go upstairs. In the chosen business of his life it would appear that he had wished to avail himself of a principle of Old Roman law: that he who does a thing through another does it himself; and thus he could sit perfectly still on his veranda with two legs and run nearly a mile a minute on a track with four.

A rural Kentucky gentleman of dead-ripe local pre-bellum flavor: exhaling a kind of Falernian bouquet as he dwelt under the serene blue sky on a beautiful bluegrass Sabine farm: a warm-visaged, soft-handed, bland-voiced man – so bland that when he strolled up to you and accosted you, you were uncertain whether he was going to offer to bet with you or to baptize you. Season after season this tranquil happy Kentuckian dwelt there, intent upon making nothing of himself and upon making the horse an adequate citizen of a state that likes to go its own gait – and to make him a leading citizen of the world: measurably he succeeded in doing both.

As he receded from view, his horses advanced into notice. He was probably never better satisfied with his stable lot and with his human lot than when at one of his annual sales he could hear the auctioneer – that high-gingered Pindar of the black walnut stump – arouse the enthusiasm of the buyers by announcing that a certain three-year-old had as its sire the Immortal Cunctator and that its dam was the peerless Swift Perdition. Year after year he dwelt there, contented in drinking the limestone water of his hillside spring with his foals and his fillies; drinking at his table the unskimmed milk of his Durham dairy; and drinking indoors and outdoors the waterproof beverage of a four-seasons philosophic decanter. The decanter resembled the limestone spring in this at least: that it could never rise higher than being full and could never be baled dry.

In the vernal season, as sole proprietor of all this teeming rural bliss, he sat on the top rail of a fence and witnessed the manufacture of the hippic generations; in summer sat on the top rail of another fence and saw his colts trained; in autumn in the judges' stand sat with a finger on his watch and saw them win; in winter, passing into a state of partial hibernation over the study of pedigrees, his fingers plunged deep in his beard, with comfortable mumblings and fumblings that bore their analogy to a bear's brumal licking of its paws.

A veritable Roman poet Horace of a man, with yearlings as his odes – and with a few mules for satires.

Surely possessed of some excellent Epicurean philosophy of his own in that he could live so long in a wretched world and escape all wretchedness. If storms broke over his head, he insisted that the weather just then was especially fine; if trouble knocked at the door, he announced with regret from the inside that the door was locked. Is there any wonder that, nobody though he insisted upon being, his appearance in public always attracted a crowd? For the inhabitants of this world are always looking for one happy inhabitant. His acquaintances hurried to him as they would break into a playful run for a barrel of lemonade at a woodland picnic when they needed to be cooled; or as they waited around a kettle of burgroo at a barbecue in autumn when they wished to be warmed. Hot or cold, they felt their need to be sprayed as to their unquiet passions by his streaming benevolence.

Always that benevolence. On two distinct occasions he had placidly reduced by one the entire meritorious population of central Kentucky; and then with a clear countenance, had presented himself at the bar of justice to be cleared. Upon his technical acquittal, the judge had casually said that no matter how guilty he was, it would have been a much fouler crime to hang a citizen with so innocent an expression; that the habitual look of innocence was of more value in a homicidal community than a verdict of guilty for two fits of distemper!

If the world should last until Kentucky passes out of history into the classic and the mythological; if Daniel Boone and the Wilderness Road should become Orion and the Milky Way; if the capture of Betsy Calloway should become the rape of Lucrece; if the two gigantic Indian fighters, the Poe brothers, should establish their claim to the authorship of those Poems and Tales which even in our own time are beginning to fall away from a mythical personage, – hardly more than an emanation of darkness, perhaps this unique Kentucky gentleman who insisted upon being no one at all will exhibit his beaming face in the heavens of those ages as Charioteer to the Horses of the Sun.

The sole warrant for here disturbing his light repose under his patchwork of turf is that he had taken to his hearthstone and heart an orphan nephew, whose destiny it was to be profoundly influenced by the environment of heart and hearthstone: by this breeding of horses, by the method of training them; by that serene outlook upon the world and that gayety of nature which attracted happiness to it as naturally as the martin box in the yard drew the martins. Possibly even more influenced in the earlier years around that fireside where there was no women, no mother, no father, either; nor parent out of doors save the motherhood of the near earth and the fatherhood of the distant sky.

From the day when he arrived on that stock farm its influences began their work upon him and kept it up during years when he was not aware. But in his own memory the first event in the long series of events – the first scene of all the scenes that made his Progress – occurred when he was about fifteen years old. As the middle-aged man, sitting in his library that morning with the Book of the Years before him, reviewed his life, his memory went straight back to that event and stopped there as though it were the beginning. Of course it was not the beginning; of course he could not himself have known where the beginning was or what it was; but he did what we all do as we look back toward childhood and try to open a road as far as memory will reach, – we begin somewhere, and the doctor began with his fifteenth year – as the first scene of his Progress. But let that scene be painted not as the doctor saw it: more nearly as it was: he was too young to know all that it contained.

It was a balmy Saturday afternoon of early summer; and uncle and nephew were out in the yard of the white and lemon-colored manor house, enjoying the shade of some blossoming locust trees. The uncle was sitting in a yellow cane-bottom chair; and he had on a yellow nankeen waistcoat and trousers; so that the chair looked like an overgrown architectural harmony attached to his dorsal raiment; and he had on a pleated bosom shirt which had been polished by his negro laundress with iron and paraffine until it looked like a cake of winter ice marked off to be cut in slices. In the top button-hole was a cluster diamond pin which represented almost a star-system; and about his throat was tied a magenta cravat: that was the day for solferinos and magentas and Madeira wine. But the neck of the wearer of the cravat was itself turning to a gouty magenta; so that the ribbon, while appropriately selected, was as a color-sign superfluous. On the grass beside him lay his black alpaca coat and panama hat and gold-headed cane and red silk handkerchief and a piece of dry wood admirable for whittling.

He had been to a colt show that morning several miles across the country in a neighborhood where there was some turbulence; not the turbulence of the colts; and he had reached home just before dinner – glad to get there without turbulence; and the dinner had been good, and now he was experiencing that comfortable expansion of girth which turns even a pessimist toward optimism; that streaming benevolence of his countenance never streamed to better advantage.

He was reading his Saturday weekly newspaper, an entire page of which showed that this was a great thoroughbred breeding-region of the world. At the distance of several yards you could have inferred as much by the character of the advertisements, each of which was headed by the little black wood-cut of a stallion. The page was blackened by this wood-cut as it repeated itself up and down, column after column. Whether the stallion were sorrel or roan or bay or chestnut or black – one wood-cut stood for all. There was one other wood-cut for jacks – all jacks.

In the same way one little wood-cut in an earlier generation had been used to stand for runaway slaves: a negro with a stick swung across his shoulder and with a bundle dangling from the stick down his fugitive back; one wood-cut for all slaves. If you saw between the legs of the figure, it was a man; if you did not – it was the other figure of man's fate in slavery.

The turfman read every item of his newspaper, having first with a due sense of proportion cast his eye on the advertisement of his own stud.

The nephew was lying on the grass near by, wearing a kind of dove-colored suit; so that from a distance he might have been taken for a huge mound of vegetable mould; he having just awakened from a nap: a heavy, rank, insolent, human cub with his powers half pent up and half unfolded, except a fully developed insolence toward all things and people except his uncle, himself, and his friend, Fred Ousley. He rolled drowsily about on the soft turf, waiting to take his turn at the newspaper: it was the only thing he read: otherwise he was too busy reading the things of life on the farm. Once he stretched himself on his back, looking upward for anything and everything in sight. The light breeze swung the boughs of the locust, now heavily draped with blossoms; and soon his eyes began to follow what looked like a flame darting in and out amid the snowy cascades of bloom – a flame that was vocal and that dropped down upon his ear crimson petals of song – the Baltimore oriole.

He liked all birds but three; and presently one of those that he disliked appeared in a fork of a locust and darted at the oriole, driving it away and then returning to the fork – the blue-jay. His hatred of this bird dated from the time when one of the negroes had told him that no blue-jays could be seen at twelve o'clock on Friday – all having gone to carry brimstone to the lower regions. After that he and Fred Ousley had made a point of trying to kill jays early Friday morning: a fatally shied stone would cut off to a dead certainty just so much of that supply of brimstone. He hated them even more on Saturday, when he thought of them as having returned. The one in the fork now was looking down at him, and, with a great mockery of bowing, called out his Fiddle-Fiddle-Fiddle: it was his way of saying: "You'll get there: and there will be brimstone, sonny!"

Of course he believed none of this legend; but suggestions live on in the mind even though they do not root themselves in faith; and memory also has its power to make us like and dislike. Presently, as he lay there stretched on the grass and near the edge of the shade, another ill-omened bird came sailing cloud-high across the blue firmament; and having taken notice of him, – a motionless form on the earth below, – it turned back and began to circle about him. That was another bird he hated. When a child he asked about it, and had been told that it removed all disagreeable things from the farms. He thought it a very kind, very self-sacrificing and industrious bird to do so. And he conceived the whole species of them as a procession of wheelbarrows operated across the sky by means of wings and tails. Afterwards, when his views grew less hazy on natural history, he lowered his opinion of the disinterested buzzard.

The third bird on which had fallen his resentment was the rain-crow: earlier in his childhood it had been told him that when the clacking wail of this songster was heard on the stillness of a summer day, a storm was coming. And he had seen storms enough on that very farm – tornadoes that cut a path through the woods as a reaper cuts his way across the wheat-field. But he saw no rain-crow to-day; you look for them in August when they haunt the cool shade-trees of lawns.

Altogether these three birds made with one another a rather formidable combination for a boy living on a farm: the one brought on storms that threatened life; the second gladly presided at your obsequies, if the opportunity were given; and the third was pleased to accompany you to the infernal regions with the necessary fuel. The arrangement seemed about perfect; apparently they had overlooked nothing of value.

Thus he had not escaped that vast romance of Nature which brooded more thickly over Kentucky country life in those days than now: a romance of superstitions and legends about bird life and animal life and tree life, that extended even to Nature's chemicals; for was there not brimstone with its story? As far back as he could remember he had been made familiar with the idea – rather terrible in its way – that there was a variety of Biblical horse which breathed brimstone. All alone one day he had made a somewhat cautious personal examination of the paddocks and stalls; and was relieved to discover that his uncle's horses breathed out only what they breathed in – Kentucky air. He felt glad that they were not of the breed of those Biblical chargers.

But then there was brimstone in reserve for a large portion of the human family; and with a perverse mocking deviltry he pushed his inquiry in this direction still farther. Without the knowledge of any one he had wasted at a drugstore in town his brightest dime for a package of the avenging substance; and at home the following day he had scraped chips together at the woodpile and started a blaze and poured the brimstone in. Actually he had a sample of hell fire in operation there behind the woodpile! There was no question that brimstone knew how to burn: it seemed well adapted for its purpose. He did not take Fred Ousley into his confidence in this experiment: the possibilities were a little too personal even for friendship!

All this reveals a trait in him which lay deeper than child's-play – a susceptibility to suggestion. Even while he amused himself as a child with the shams and superstitions about nature, these lived on in his mind as part of its furnishings. Alas, that this should be true for all of us – that we cannot forget the things we do not believe in. To the end of our lives our thoughts have to move amid the obstructions and rubbish of the useless and the laughable. The salon of our inner dwelling is largely filled with old furniture which we decline to sit in, but are obliged to look at, and are powerless to remove; and which fills the favorite recesses where we should like to arrange the new.

There they were, then, that Saturday afternoon: the uncle with his newspaper and the nephew at that moment with his group of evil birds.

There was an interruption. Around the yard with its velvet turf and blooming shrubs and vines and flowers, that filled the air with fragrance, was a plank fence newly whitewashed. All the fences of the farm had been newly whitewashed; and they ran hither and thither across the emerald of the landscape like structures of white marble. Through the gate of the yard fence which was heard to shut behind him there now advanced toward uncle and nephew a neighbor of theirs, the minister of the country church, himself a bluegrass farmer. He was one of the many who liked to seek the company of the untroubled turfman. The two were good neighbors and great friends. The minister came oftenest for a visit on Saturday afternoons, as if he wished to touch at this harbor of a quiet life while passing from the earthly fields of the week to the Sabbath's holy land.

At the sound of the latch the uncle lifted his eyes from his newspaper.

"Bring a chair, Downs, will you?" he said in a cordial undertone; and soon there was a fine group of rural humanity under the blossoming locusts: the two men talking, and the boy, now that his turn had come at last, lying on the grass absorbed in the newspaper.

The men were characters of broad plain speech, much like English squires of two centuries earlier: not ladylike men: Chaucer might have been pleased to make one of their group and listen, and turn them afterwards into fine old English tales; Hogarth might have craved the privilege to sit near and observe and paint; and a certain Sir John Falstaff might have been at home with them – in the absence of the "Merry Wives."

There was another interruption. Around the corner of the manor house a young servant advanced, bearing a waiter with two deep glasses well filled: at the bottom the drink was golden; it was green and snow-white at the top: a little view of icebergs with pine trees growing on them.

The servant smiled and approached with embarrassment, having discovered a guest; and in a lowered tone she offered to the master of the house apologies for not bringing three.

"This is yours, Aleck," said the host, holding out one glass to the minister. "This is for you, Downs. Now, Melissa, make me one, will you?"

"None for me," said the minister.

"Then never mind, Melissa. But wait – lemonade?"

"Yes; lemonade. It is the very thing."

"As it is or as it might be?"

"As it is."

"Lemonade without the decanter, Melissa."

While the servant was in the house, the uncle and the nephew waited with their glasses untouched.

The turfman was very happy – happy in his guest, in his nephew, in himself, in everything: his mind overflowed with his quaint playfulness; and when he talked, you were loath to interrupt him.

"Aleck," he said, rattling the ice in his julep, "don't you suppose that when we get to heaven, nothing will make us happier there than remembering the good times we had in this world? so if you want to be happy there, be happy here. This is one of the pleasures that I expect to carry in memory if I am ever transformed into a male seraph. But I may not have to remember. If there is any provision made for the thirst of the Kentucky redeemed, do you know what I think will be the reward of all central Kentucky male angels? From under the great white throne there will trickle an ice-cold stream of this, ready-made – and I shouldn't wonder if there were a Kentuckian under the throne making it. The Kentucky delegation would be camped somewhere near, though there will be two delegations, of course, because they will divide on politics. And don't you fear that there will not be others hastening to the banks of that stream! It is too late to look for young Moses in the bulrushes; but I shouldn't wonder if the whole ransomed universe discovered old Moses in the mint."

"Which mint?" said the minister, who kept his worldly wits about him.

"Aleck," replied the turfman, "I leave it to you whether that is not too flippant a remark with which to close a gentleman's solemn discourse."

The lemonade was served.

"Is yours sour enough, Aleck?"

The visitor found it to his taste.

"Is yours sweet enough, Downs?"

This hurt Downs' feelings: it implied that he was not old enough to like things sour. He replied surlily that his might have been stronger.

The servant, watching from inside a window, judged by the angle at which the glasses were tilted that they were empty: she returned and asked whether she should bring 'one more all around.'

"More lemonade, Aleck?"

"Thank you, no more for me – but it was good, better than yours."

"Another for you, Downs?"

Downs thought that he would not have another just for the moment: the servant disappeared.

The nephew returned to his paper. The turfman took from the turf a piece of whittling wood, split it, and handed the larger piece to the minister. The minister produced his penknife and began to whittle. In those days a countryman who did not carry his penknife with a big blade well sharpened for whittling as he talked with his neighbor stood outside the manners and customs of a simple cheerful land. And now the two friends were ready to enjoy their afternoon – the vicar of souls and the vicar of the stables.

The minister began to speak of his troubles – with that strange leaning we all have to let our confidences fall upon people who are not too good: the vicar of the stables was not too good to be sympathetic. It was all summed up in one sentence – discouragement about his growing boys. From the beginnings of their lives he had tried to teach them the things they were not to do; and all their lives they had seemed bent on doing those things. He felt disheartened as the boys grew older and their waywardness increased. What not to do– morning and night what not to do. Yet they were always doing it.

Out under the trees the peaceful happy sounds of summer life in the yard came to the ears of the minister as nature's chorus of happiness and indifference. The breeder of thoroughbreds, as his friend grew silent, laughed with his peaceful nature, and remarked with respect and gentleness: —

"I never train my colts in that way."

"My sons are not colts," said the minister, laughing. "Nor young jackasses!"

"Yes, I know they are not colts; but I doubt whether their difference makes any difference in the training of the two species of animal."

After a pause which was filled with little sounds made by the industrious penknives, the master of the stables went into the matter for the pleasure of it: —