The Reign of Law

65-one Saturday afternoon-a lad was cutting weeds in a wood

s feet protected from briers or from the bees scattered upon the wild white clover or from the terrible hidden thorns of the honey-locust. No socks. A

sh; great thistles, thousand-nettled; great ironweed, plumed with royal purple; now and then a straggling bramble prone with velvety berries-the outpost of a patch behind him; now and then-more

erever a woodland stood; and around every woodland dense cornfields; or, denser still, the leagues of swaying hemp. The smell of this now lay heavy on the air, seeming to be dragged hither and thither like a slow scum on the breeze, like a moss on a slug

hook-he was using that for lack of a scythe. Turning, he walked back to the edge of the brier thicket, sat down in the shade of a black walnut, threw off his tattered head-gear, and, reachin

rumors had reached him away off here at work on his father's farm, of a great university to be opened the following autumn at Lexington. The like of it with its many colleges Kentucky, the South

of the nation lately at strife-scene of their advancing and retreating armies-pit of a frenzied commonwealth-here was to arise this calm university, pledge of the new times,

ho is to be a soldier-one day he hears a distant bugle: at once HE knows. A second glimpses a bellying sail: straightway the ocean path beckons to

se sometimes than a starting-point for a young life; as a flowerpot might serve to sprout an oak, and as the oak would inevitably reach the hour when it would either die or burst out, root and branch, into the whole heavens and the earth; as the shell and yolk of an egg are the starting-point for the wing and eye of the eagle. One thing only he had not outgrown, in one thing only he was not unhappy: his religious

fitted his ear as the right sound, as the gladness of long awaited intelligence. It was bugle to the soldier, sail to the sailor, lamp of learning to the inn

of the woods that Saturday afternoon. Sitting low amid heat and weeds and thorns, he was already as one who

ible College, had been travelling over the state during the summer, pleading its cause before the

the Kentucky wilderness as a house of religious liberty; and the lad was a great-grandchild of the fo