are not so many small or so many leased farms. The proprietors are men of means, and come the nearest to forming a landed gentry of any class of men we have in this country. They are not city men running a brief and rapid career on a fancy farm, but genuine countrymen, who love the land and mean to keep it. I remember with pleasure one rosy-faced young farmer, whose place we casually invaded in Lincoln County. He was a graduate of Harvard University and of the Law School, but here he was with his trousers tucked into his boot-legs, helping to cultivate his corn, or looking after his herds upon his broad acres. He was nearly the ideal of a simple, hearty, educated country farmer and gentleman.
But the feature of this part of Kentucky which struck me the most forcibly, and which is perhaps the most unique, is the immense sylvan or woodland pastures. The forests are simply vast grassy orchards of maple and oak, or other trees, where the herds graze and repose. They everywhere give a look to the land as of royal parks and commons. They are as clean as a meadow and as inviting as long, grassy vistas and circles of cool shade can make them. All the saplings and bushy undergrowths common to forests have been removed, leaving only the large trees scattered here and there, which seem to protect rather than occupy the ground. Such a look of leisure, of freedom, of amplitude, as these forest groves give to the landscape!
What vistas, what aisles, what retreats, what depths of sunshine and shadow! The grass is as
uniform as a carpet, and grows quite up to the boles of the trees. One peculiarity of the blue-grass is that it takes complete possession of the soil; it suffers no rival; it is as uniform as a fall of snow. Only one weed seems to hold its own against it, and that is ironweed, a plant like a robust purple aster five or six feet high. This is Kentucky's one weed, so far as I saw. It was low and inconspicuous while I was there, but before fall it gets tall and rank, and its masses of purple flowers make a very striking spectacle. Through these forest glades roam the herds of cattle or horses. I know no prettier sight than a troop of blooded mares with their colts slowly grazing through these stately aisles, some of them in sunshine, and some in shadow. In riding along the highway there was hardly an hour when such a scene was not in view. Very often the great farmhouse stands in one of these open forests and is approached by a graveled road that winds amid the trees. At Colonel Alexander's the cottage of his foreman, as well as many of the farm buildings and stables, stands in a grassy forest, and the mares with their colts roam far and wide. Sometimes when they were going for water, or were being started in for the night, they would come charging along like the wind, and what a pleasing sight it was to see their glossy coats glancing adown the long sun-flecked vistas! Sometimes the more open of these forest lands are tilled; I saw fine crops of hemp growing on them, and in one or two cases corn. But where the land has never been under cultivation it is
remarkably smooth—one can drive with a buggy with perfect ease and freedom anywhere through these woods. The ground is as smooth as if it had been rolled. In Kentucky we are beyond the southern limit of the glacial drift; there are no surface bowlders and no abrupt knolls or gravel banks. Another feature which shows how gentle and uniform the forces which have moulded this land have been are the beautiful depressions which go by the ugly name of "sink-holes." They are broad turf-lined bowls sunk in the surface here and there, and as smooth and symmetrical as if they had been turned out by a lathe. Those about the woodlands of Colonel Alexander were from one to two hundred feet across and fifteen or twenty feet deep. The green turf sweeps down into them without a break, and the great trees grow from their sides and bottoms the same as elsewhere. They look as if they might have been carved out by the action of whirling water, but are probably the result of the surface water seeking a hidden channel in the underlying rock, and thus slowly carrying away the soil with it. They all still have underground drainage through the bottom. By reason of these depressions this part of the State has been called "goose-nest land," their shape suggesting the nests of immense geese. On my way southward to the Mammoth Cave, over the formation known as the subcarboniferous, they formed the most noticeable feature of the landscape. An immense flock of geese had nested here, so that in places the rims of their nests touched one another.
As you near the great cave you see a mammoth depression, nothing less than a broad, oval valley which holds entire farms, and which has no outlet save through the bottom. In England these depressions would be called punch-bowls; and though they know well in Kentucky what punch is made of, and can furnish the main ingredient of superb quality, and in quantity that would quite fill some of these grassy basins, yet I do not know that they apply this term to them. But in the good old times before the war, when the spirit of politics ran much higher than now, these punch-bowls and the forests about them were the frequent scenes of happy and convivial gatherings. Under the great trees the political orators held forth; a whole ox would be roasted to feed the hungry crowd, and something stronger than punch flowed freely. One farmer showed us in our walk where Crittenden and Breckinridge had frequently held forth, but the grass had long been growing over the ashes where the ox had been roasted.
What a land for picnics and open-air meetings! The look of it suggested something more large and leisurely than the stress and hurry of our American life. What was there about it that made me think of Walter Scott and the age of romance and chivalry? and of Robin Hood and his adventurous band under the greenwood tree? Probably it was those stately, open forests, with their clear, grassy vistas where a tournament might be held, and those superb breeds of horses wandering through them upon which
it was so easy to fancy knights and ladies riding. The land has not the mellow, time-enriched look of England; it could not have it under our harder, fiercer climate; but it has a sense of breadth and a roominess which one never sees in England except in the great royal parks.
The fences are mainly posts and rails, which fall a little short of giving the look of permanence which a hedge or a wall and dike afford.
The Kentuckians have an unhandsome way of treating their forests when they want to get rid of them; they girdle the trees and let them die, instead of cutting them down at once. A girdled tree dies hard; the struggle is painful to look upon; inch by inch, leaf by leaf, it yields, and the agony is protracted nearly through the whole season. The land looked accursed when its noble trees were all dying or had died, as if smitten by a plague. One hardly expected to see grass or grain growing upon it. The girdled trees stand for years, their gaunt skeletons blistering in the sun or blackening in the rain. Through southern Indiana and Illinois I noticed this same lazy, ugly custom of getting rid of the trees.