[His Old Kentucky Home.]
While traveling recently through the South, the writer was marooned for several hours near Horse Cave, in Kentucky. The Cumberland River was very high, swamping the darkies’ cabins en route, compelling the colored people to take refuge on their roofs, where they waited “fo’ de ribber to go down.”
The negroes accepted the situation very cheerfully, many playing their banjoes and singing olden time melodies and making light of their predicament.
Almost involuntarily, I began humming “My Old Kentucky Home” and my thoughts were of the “yellow fields o’ corn,” when a voice behind me inquired, “Do you like that song?” I assured him that the tune was all right, but the words were a trifle silly.
“Well, I don’t think so,” he remarked, “the words and air are both very sweet to me, and if you’ll make room for me, I’ll tell you how that song compelled me to make a trip of 2,000 miles.”
Space was given him and he began his narrative.
“It was five years ago that I was induced to go west by the alluring advertisements of the railroad company, who related how easy it was to speedily get rich in Colorado.
“I started with my outfit and a couple of weeks later located at Cripple Creek, then a prosperous mining camp.
“Well, stranger, I didn’t like it there in the mountains, I couldn’t get used to the country and the people, and the climate was so different from ‘Old Kaintuck.’ Why, it was just as liable to snow on the 4th of July as it was on the 1st of January.