



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: "To live long, live
naturally; eat what you want, and walk on the sunny side of the street."

School children think that some wise man made all the hard rules of
grammar that grown-up folks try to teach them.  They do not know that
the child-man learned to talk first and that the rules were made from
his speech.  It is like the simple people at the circus who think the
trained horse is dancing to the music; it is the music that is dancing
to him.  From the facts of life we draw our rules just as the scholars
made rules of grammar from the facts of language.

Nature is the One great Fact.

I was thinking of one of her facts the other day--she has so many--but
one I had noticed very plainly: the man who lives close to her is an
optimist.

Let the farmer fail year after year, and still he plants, hoping.  Let
the merchant fall behind one year and he is shaken; another year, and he
quits. One season of deep water-hauling sends the fisherman home to his
fields.  When the wild game vanishes the pioneer hunter becomes the
pioneer farmer.  The merchant, the lawyer, the doctor,--there never was
one who did not dream, betimes, over his books, that he would yet live
to retire and till his acres.

Every failure in life goes back to the soil for a new start.

That is the fact; now for the rule.  It is this: God intended that man
should be, first of all, a soil-worker.  And tilling the soil includes
not only planting, but bringing all growing and living things thereon to
strength.

Rearing things on the soil is man's natural vocation, since neither
drought, nor flood, nor failure, can shut out from his heart that
instinct of hope which has come down through so many centuries of
soil-loving ancestors.  The hoping instinct has been housed in him so
long that it is part of his heredity.

Maritime nations found empires, but not religions.  Religions come from
the soil.  Men, living in the open, watching their flocks by night, find
in the eternal wonder of the soul-questioning stars that which satisfies
their own souls.

Imagine fighting Rome founding a religion! Or bookish Greece!  Or the
trading Saxon!

Religions come from mangers.  All great soul-dreams were born amid
flocks and herds.

This is my own story, and the telling of it shall be in my own way.  And
as I am not a writer, but a forester, doubtless my telling will be all
awry.  For I have seen enough of life to know that the generals who have
won in the field of fiction, like the generals who have won in the field
of fact, have won because they have had the drilling.

And in my case the drilling has been only trees--trees, and their
children, the flowers.




                              *CHAPTER II*

                            *LITTLE SISTER*


This is my story, as I said, and the telling of it must be in my own
way.  That is why I am giving this chapter first--because it happened
first--four years before the real story began. Another reason is that in
the telling of it I can set forth the characters of the old general, my
grandsire, who believed in fighting; of my Aunt Lucretia, his daughter,
who believed in pedigrees; of Eloise, the beautiful and daring one, who
believed in dancing and riding and shooting, and in making those who
loved her miserable; of Colonel Goff, an Englishman, who believed in
horses and hounds; and of Little Sister, who believed in Uncle Jack; and
even of myself, Uncle Jack, who believed in trees.

Little Sister is the three-year-old daughter of my brother Ned
Ballington, who, with his lovely wife, Thesis, and his major domo, Uncle
Wash (a <DW52> gentleman of the Old School), and his other live things
and birds, resides on the farm adjoining ours.

But Little Sister, whose real name is Mildred, and her brother, two
years younger, who was baptized Edward, but whom Uncle Jack had
nicknamed Captain Skipper, because nothing could keep him still, spent
the most of their time at The Home Stretch, the home of their great
grandsire, General John Rutherford, where also lived their Aunt
Lucretia, and Eloise, and Uncle Jack.

It was either very hot or very cold on those days when Uncle Jack did
not drive them over to spend the day, and maybe a night, too.  Once in a
great while the footing was too slippery for the pony.  But these
omissions occurred, at the most, perhaps twice each summer and winter;
for the heart of the Middle Basin, that beautiful bluegrass country in
which they live, beats in the breast of Summer.

John Rutherford, the First, built The Home Stretch in 1800.  It adjoined
the lands of Andrew Jackson, and the very spirit of the old fighter
hangs over the place.  For John Rutherford had loved him--nay, had
lived, fought, and died for him--at New Orleans.  There is a tradition
that Old Hickory himself named the place--in fact, that John Rutherford
owned it for no other reason than that his horse beat Andrew Jackson's
in the home stretch.  The bet was a thousand acres of land.  The race
track may still be seen at Clover Bottom, just across the way, where
Stone's River makes a bend around a hundred acres of land, rich as ever
the crow made a granary of, and as level as Chalmette Plain, where
Jackson's riflemen stopped the British before New Orleans.

Little Sister was a fair, frail, sensitive little tot