“With love and sympathy,
“Jeannette.”
The following week one of the freight wagons hauling goods from the railroad to Hyden stopped at the house and unloaded four heavy packing cases. They contained nearly five hundred books; which had been shipped, still in the sections of the mahogany sectional book cases; and just as John had arranged them. She had two of her school boys unpack and set up the cases in her room.
These, with the books she had accumulated, and those which her father’s grandfather had brought overland [pg 36] from Virginia, gave to her simple bed room much the appearance of a library.
On Sunday the 18th of August, Jeannette’s grandmother, the last of her blood kin, died, and was buried on the mountain side, where were the white, picketed graves of her father, mother and grandfather and the unpicketed, almost unmarked, sunken-in graves of those of the Litmans she did not know, who had gone before her day.
The day after the funeral she rented the place to Simeon Blair but as his family was small, they had only a child, a girl of seven, there was room for Jeannette; so she kept her room and paid four dollars a week board. The Blairs bought her cows and chickens, but refused the mule as a gift; so she paid Simeon five dollars a month for looking after old Silas.
On the fifth of September she left Big Creek for Lexington, Kentucky; and upon her arrival on the seventh, went directly to the room she had reserved at the University dormitory; and on the tenth matriculated as a junior.
The eighth, she spent in most careful shopping. Sunday, the ninth, she attended services at the First Presbyterian Church and heard her first pipe organ. As she walked back to the dormitory she drew comparisons between her new clothes and those of the girls she passed. While satisfied with her modest blue suit and her shoes and stockings, she concluded her hat had too great variety and quantity of coloring and on Monday, as soon as they were dismissed, exchanged it; having first informed the milliner that she had worn it to church. The milliner replied: “That’s nothing, many of my customers have hats sent on approval and wear them to church, returning them on Monday.”
[pg 37] After exchanging her hat she called upon Mrs. Allen. The Allen home, an old red brick house with massive colonial pillars, a slate roof, thick walls and large rooms with high ceilings, was more than sixty years old; and Judge Allen, who was fifty-five, had been born in it. Several of the rooms had open fire places. It had first been heated in that way; then with grates and a large anthracite stove; then a furnace had been installed. Recently it had been remodeled and fitted with steam heating and the most modern electrical appliances. These things were now demanded by the servants, who refused service in houses not having them.
The Judge would not permit the open fire place of the library to be removed. They used this as a sitting and informal reception room and an open fire was kept burning from October to May. One of his clients who had an extensive woodland on Elkhorn, furnished the oak and hickory logs. It was in this room that Mrs. Allen received Jeannette.
Mrs. Allen was about fifty years of age, with beautiful, wavy, white hair. She and Jeannette were of the same weight, one hundred and thirty pounds, though Jeannette was more than an inch taller. Both had the general appearance of women who trace their lineage from English ancestry, through the cavalier stock of Colonial Virginia; brunettes, of clear cut feature and slender, graceful bodies; eyes either gray or brown—Mrs. Allen’s were brown, Jeannette’s were gray.