Kentucky

- Kentucky Hunters - Old French Mansion- Fiddling- Billiards- Mr.

It possessed a motley population, composed of the creole descendants of the original French colonists; the keen traders from the Atlantic States; the backwoodsmen of Kentucky and Tennessee; the Indians and half- breeds of the prairies; together with a singular aquatic race that had grown up from the navigation of the rivers - the "boatmen of the Mississippi;- who possessed habits, manners, and almost a language, peculiarly their own, and strongly technical.

You will be surrounded by a host of admirers, pouring into your ears their admiration and love, and then what shall I have to support me, but that 'yes,' with which you once raised me from the depths of despair to an elevation of happiness that was high as the highest pinnacle of the caverns of Kentucky; raising me from the depths of Chimborazo."

{caverns of Kentucky = Mammoth Cave; Chimborazo = a 20,500 foot volcano in Ecuador}

My mother was all American - no alkali-spider about HER, I can tell you; she was of the best blood of Kentucky, the bluest Blue-grass aristocracy, very proud and acrimonious - or maybe it is ceremonious.

My mother heard him say it; and he said those skeletons were two million years old, which astonished her and made her Kentucky pretensions look small and pretty antiphonal, not to say oblique.