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out of place if anywhere confronted. On, and on, and on you go, seeing only the repetition of field and meadow, wood and lawn, a winding stream, an artificial pond, a sunny vineyard, a blooming orchard, a stone wall, a hedge-row, a tobacco barn, a warehouse, a race-track, cattle under the trees, sheep on the slopes, swine in the pools, and, half hidden by evergreens and shrubbery, the homelike, unpretentious houses that crown very simply and naturally the entire picture of material prosperity. They strike you as built not for their own sakes. Few will offer anything that lays hold upon the memory, unless it be perhaps a front portico with Doric, Ionic, or Corinthian columns; for your typical Kentuckian likes to go into his house through a classic entrance, no matter what inharmonious things may be beyond; and after supper on summer evenings, nothing fills him with serener comfort than to tilt his chair back against a classic support, as he smokes a pipe and argues on the immortality of a pedigree.

On the whole, you feel that nature lies ready, or has long waited, for a more exquisite sense in domestic architecture; that the immeasurable possibilities of delightful landscape have gone

made the land so kind to beauty; for no transformation of a rude, ungenial landscape is needed. The earth does not require to be trimmed and combed and perfumed. The airy vistas and delicate slopes are ready-made, the park-like woodlands invite, the tender, clinging children of the summer, the deep, echoless repose of the whole land, all ask that art be laid on every undulation and stored in every nook. And there are days with such Arcadian colors in air and cloud and sky-days with such panoramas of calm, sweet pastoral groups and harmonies below, such rippling and flashing of waters through green underlights and golden interspaces, that the shy, coy spirit of beauty seems to be wandering half sadly abroad and shunning all the haunts of man.

But little agricultural towns are not art-centers. Of itself rural life does not develop esthetic perceptions, and the last, most difficult thing to bring into the house is this shy, elusive spirit of beauty. The Kentucky woman has perhaps been corrupted in childhood by tasteless surroundings. Her lovable mission, the creation of a multitude of small lovely objects, is undertaken feebly and blindly. She may not know

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unrecognized or wasted. Too often there is in form and outline no response to the spirit of the scenery, and there is dissonance of color-color which makes the first and strongest impression. The realm of taste is prevailingly the realm of the want of taste, or of its meretricious and commonplace violations. Many of the houses have a sort of featureless, cold, insipid ugliness, and interior and exterior decorations are apt to go for nothing or for something worse. You repeat that nature awaits more art, since she

"SPRING HILL."

how to create beauty, may not know what beauty is. The temperament of her lord, too, is practical: a man of substance and stomach, sound at heart, and with an abiding sense of his own responsibility and importance, honestly insisting on sweet butter and new-laid eggs, home-made bread and home-grown mutton, but little reveling in the delicacies of sensibility, and with no more eye for crimson poppies or blue corn-flowers in his house than amid his grain. Many a Kentucky woman would

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make her home beautiful if her husband would allow it.

Amid a rural people, also, no class of citizens is more influential than the clergy, who go about as the shepherds of the right; and without doubt in Kentucky, as elsewhere, ministerial ideals have wrought their effects on taste. Perhaps it is well to state that this is said broadly, and particularly of the past. The Kentucky preachers during earlier times were a fiery, zealous, and austere set, proclaiming that this world was not a home, but a wilderness of sin, and exhorting their people to live under the awful shadow of Eternity. Beauty in every material form was a peril, the seductive garment of the devil. Well nigh all that made for esthetic culture was put down, and, like frost on venturesome flowers, sermons fell on beauty in dress, entertainment, equipage, houses, church architecture, music, the drama, the operaeverything. The meek young spirit was led to the creek or pond, and perhaps the ice was broken for her baptism. If, as she sat in the pew, any vision of her chaste loveliness reached the pulpit, back came the warning that she would some day turn into a withered hag, and must inevitably be "eaten of worms." What wonder if the sense of beauty pined or went astray, and found itself completely avenged in the building of such churches? And yet there is nothing that even religion more surely demands than the fostering of the sense of beauty within us, and through this it is that we work most wisely toward the civilization of the future.

IV. HOMES SINCE THE WAR.

MANY rural homes have been built since the war, but the old type of country life has vanished. On the whole, there has been a strong movement of population toward the towns, rapidly augmenting their size. Elements of showiness and freshness have been added to their once unobtrusive architecture. And, in particular, that art movement and sudden quickening of the love of beauty which swept over this country a few years since has had its influence here. But for the most part the newer homes are like the newer homes in other American cities, and the style of interior appointment and decoration has few native char

acteristics. As a rule the people love the country life less than of yore, since an altered social system has deprived it of much leisure, and has added hardships. The Kentuckian does not regard it as part of his mission in life to feed fodder to stock, but to have it fed; and servants are hard to get, the colored ladies and gentlemen having developed a taste for urban society.

What, then, is to be the future of the bluegrass region? When population in the United States becomes much denser and the pressure is felt in every neighborhood, who will possess it? One seems to see in certain tendencies of American life the probable answer to this question. The small farmer will be bought out, and will disappear. Estates will grow fewer and larger. The whole land will pass into the hands of the rich, being too precious for the poor to own. Already here and there one notes the disposition to create vast domains by the slow swallowing up of contiguous small ones. Consider, then, in this connection the taste already shown by the rich American in certain parts of the United States to found a country place in the style of an English lord. Consider, too, that the landscape is much like the loveliest of rural England; that the trees, the grass, the sculpture of the scenery are such as make the perfect beauty of a park; that the fox, the bobwhite, the thoroughbred, and the deer are indigenous. Apparently, therefore, one can foresee the yet distant time when this will become the region of splendid homes and estates that will nourish a taste for outdoor sports and offer an escape from the too-wearying cities. On the other hand, a powerful and ever-growing interest is that of the horse, racer or trotter. He brings into the State his increasing capital, his types of men. Year after year he buys farms, and lays out tracks, and builds stables, and edits journals, and turns agriculture into grazing. In time the blue-grass region may become the Yorkshire of America.

But let the future have its own. The country will become theirs who deserve it, whether they build palaces or barns. One only hopes that when the old homesteads have been torn down or have fallen into ruins, the tradition may still run that they too had their day and deserved their page of history.

James Lane Allen.

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I.

"CAPTAIN, MY CAPTAIN!"

BY WOLCOTT BALESTIER.

Author of "A Common Story," "Reffey," etc.

ERNA was not allowed to see the papers until the tenth day. Then she read the story of his death in his own paper. Terror crept over her as she read, and she cast the "Telepheme" from her, and buried her weak head in her hands, living over the anguish of that moment. She shuddered again with the hideous crash of the collision, and went whirling in his embrace down, down into a dizzy blackness, and then lay at the bottom of the cañon, the wreck piled on top of them and round about them, the air loud with the cowing noise of escaping steam, and wild with the shrieks of the dying. His poor white face stared up at her from under the wreckage, yearning with love, horrid with pain, and his tortured lips framed the words which imposed a sacred duty on her future:

"Keep up the fight!"

Aleck had left her everything he owned, they told her, and she knew why. It was not only as his promised wife, it was as the inheritor of his work; and a week later, when she was carried down-stairs for the first time, she sent for Rignold, who, with no help but Barton's, had got out two issues of the "Telepheme" since the death of his chief, and asked him to put her name at the head of the paper. For the next week's issue Rignold set up this legend to appear above the editorial notices:

"The Rustler Telepbeme."

BY

BERNA MINTERMAN DEXTER.

FOUNDED BY ALEXANDER CHESTER.

Rignold turned his rules around the concluding line, making an oblong frame of black for it. The following editorial, written by Berna from her couch, was arranged to appear below the notices:

In assuming charge of the "Telepheme," it is proper that we should say a few words. The terrible railroad accident which occurred between Cañon City and Topaz three weeks ago has cast a pall over the community, and is still fresh in all VOL. XLIV.-9.

minds. More than a hundred citizens of Rustler were on the ill-fated excursion train, bound for the celebration of Potato Day at Maverick, and above a dozen were either killed outright or seriously injured. Among the former the editor of this paper, Alexander Chester, was numbered; among the latter is included the writer of this column. This painful personal reference will, we trust, be forgiven us in view of the circumstances, as some explanation is due our readers of the reasons which induce us to continue the publication of the "Telepheme" under the old name and at the old stand. In making this explanation, we should not feel honest toward our readers in attempting to conceal a fact, no doubt already known to many of them, viz., the relation subsisting between the late and the present editor. It is due to all concerned that we should mention this, as it is because the present writer feels herself to be, in a true sense, the widow of the late editor, that she presumes to attempt the undertaking of carrying on a paper which, in his hands, has been such a power for good in this community. in response to a dying wish, we need not say is This difficult post, assumed most reluctantly not taken up with any feeling of competence to the labors before us, nor with any feeling but that many others would fill the position more adequately and wisely. We are led to take hold of this work, where it was left off by Alexander Chester, solely out of respect for his memory, and with the belief that one who was privileged to know the hopes and plans for this town and this community which beat in that great heart may be able to carry them forward-feebly indeed, but with a sympathy and understanding impossible to any stranger. The present editor, in printing her name at the head of this column, consecrates her life to the work which fell a fortnight since from the palsied hand of Alexander Chester. All Rustler knows what that work was. The entire future of the town is bound up in it. We must have the railroad. The Three C's must come our way. Into this cause Alexander Chester poured his life-energy; to it he gave all he was, or hoped to be. As the officer on the field of battle snatches up the weapon that has fallen from his dead captain, and presses on, so we take up this work, with malice toward none, and with charity for all; but presenting a solid front to the common enemy, resolved that Topaz shall not be allowed to accrete to herself this new source of wealth and strength. It is a life-and-death struggle: we know it, and Topaz knows it. United and unanimous as we are, we have only to continue to assert our rights, and to make the advantages of Rustler duly known, to secure the Colorado and California Central without a doubt.

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