



Produced by Al Haines.




[Illustration: Cover art]




[Illustration: I WAS NEVER SO HAPPY (Page 80)]




                            JACK BALLINGTON
                                FORESTER


                                   BY

                          JOHN TROTWOOD MOORE

               AUTHOR OF "OLD MISTIS;" "A SUMMER HYMNAL;"
                      "THE BISHOP OF COTTONTOWN;"
                           "UNCLE WASH," ETC.



                     ILLUSTRATIONS BY GEORGE GIBBS



                             THOMAS LANGTON
                            TORONTO, CANADA.




                          Copyright, 1911, by
                        THE JOHN C. WINSTON Co.




                              TO THE TWINS
                      HELEN AND MARY DANIEL MOORE




                               *CONTENTS*


                                  *I*

                      *THE HEIR OF THE BLUEGRASS*

CHAPTER

I  Soul Dreams and the Soil
II  Little Sister


                                  *II*

                          *"A TWILIGHT PIECE"*

I  The Flame in the Wood
II  The Home-Stretch
III  The Hickories
IV  Colonel Goff
V  Pedigrees and Principles
VI  The Make-Believe
VII  The Chimes of the Wisteria
VIII  The Stone-Crop
IX  The Transplanted Pine
X  Conquering Satan
XI  Two Ways of Love
XII  Work and Mine Acre
XIII  The Unattainable
XIV  God and a Butterfly
XV  Hickories and Old Hickory
XVI  Heart's Ease
XVII  "Lady Carfax"
XVIII  The Last Dance
XIX  The High Jump


                                 *III*

                          *THE HICKORY'S SON*

I  "Love is not Love That Alters"
II  A Dream and Its Ending
III  The Awakening
IV  The Call of the Drum
V  The First Tennessee
VI  The Battle in the Bacaue Mountains
VII  The Juramentados


                                  *IV*

                            *THE BURGEONING*

I  Two of a Kind
II  How Aunt Lucretia Ran Away
III  A Night with Captain Skipper
IV  My First Automobile
V  The Sick Tree




                            *ILLUSTRATIONS*


I Was Never So Happy...... _Frontispiece_

"Stop Her--He'll Kill Her," I Cried

"Love is not Love that Alters."

I was on Him, My Knee on His Breast




                               *FOREWORD*


_I am the child of the Centuries.  I am the son of the AEons which were.
I have always been, and I shall always be.  To make me it has taken
fire, star-dust, and the Spirit of God--the lives of billions of people,
and the lights of a million suns._

_I have grown from sun and star-dust to the Thing-Which-Thinks._

_It were the basest ingratitude if I were not both thankful to God and
proud of my pedigree._

_What has come to me has been good; what shall come will be better: for
I am Evolution, and I grow ever to greater things.  Life has been good;
death will be better; for it is the cause of all my past, making for a
still greater future._

_And this I know, not from Books nor from Knowledge, but from the
unafraid, never silent voice of Instinct within me, which is God._

_My debt to the past is great: I can never, in full, repay it; for they,
my creditors, passed with it.  They left me a world beautiful: shall I
make it a world bare?  They left a world bountiful: shall I leave it
blazed and barren to the sands of death?_

_I am in debt to the Past.  Shall the Future present the bill to find
that I have gone to my grave a bankrupt?  Find that I have wantonly laid
waste the land, leaving no root of wild flower, no shade of tree, no
spring that falleth from the hills?_

_Shall I destroy their trees for the little gain it may bring to my
short Life-tenantry?  Shall I make of their land a desert by day and a
deluge by night? Shall I stamp with the degeneracy of gullies my own
offspring, and scar with the red birth-mark of poverty the unborn of my
own breed?_

_I live, charged with a great Goodness from the Past: I can die, paying
it, only by a greater Kindness for the Future._




                                  *I*

                      *THE HEIR OF THE BLUEGRASS*



                           *JACK BALLINGTON,
                               FORESTER*



                              *CHAPTER I*

                       *SOUL-DREAMS AND THE SOIL*


Those who live near to Nature learn much: for it is only by living close
to her that we learn from her.  The best advice ever given on longevity
was from the cheery old gentleman who said: