A great river has all the sea’s charm and much of its mystery and sadness.  The boy standing on the Kentucky shore was under this spell as he listened to these sounds of nature at nightfall on the Ohio, and watched the majestic sweep of its waters—­unfettered and unsullied—­through the boundless and unbroken forests.  Yet he turned eagerly to listen to another sound that came from human-kind.  It was the wild music of the boatman’s horn winding its way back from the little ship, now far away and rounding the dusky bend.  Partly flying and partly floating, it stole softly up the shadowed river.  The melody echoed from the misty Kentucky hills, lingered under the overhanging trees, rambled through the sighing cane-brakes, loitered among the murmuring rushes—­thus growing ever fainter, sweeter, wilder, sadder, as it came.  He did not know why this sound of the boatman’s horn always touched him so keenly and moved him so deeply.  He could not have told why his eyes grew strangely dim as he heard it now, or why a strange tightening came around his heart.  He was but an ignorant lad of the woods.  It was not for him to know that these few notes—­so few, so simple, so artlessly blown by a rude boatman—­touched the deep fountain of the soul, loosing the mighty torrent pent up in every human breast.  Pity, tenderness, yearning, the struggle and the triumph of life,—­the boy felt everything and all unknowingly, but with quivering sensibility.  For he was not merely an ignorant lad; he was also one of those who are set apart throughout their lives to feel many things which they are never permitted to comprehend.

When the last echo of the boatman’s horn had melted among the darkling hills, he turned as instinctively as a sun-worshipper faces the east and drank in another musical refrain.  The Angelus was pealing faintly from the bell of the little log chapel far up the river, hidden among the trees.  The faith which it betokened was not his own faith, nor the faith of those with whom he lived, but the beauty and sweetness of the token appealed to him none the less.  How beautiful, how sweet it was!  As it thus came drifting down with the river’s deepening shadows, he thought of the little band of Sisters—­angels of charity—­kneeling under that rough roof; those brave gentlewomen of high birth and delicate breeding who were come with the very first to take an heroic part in the making of Kentucky and, so doing, in the winning of the whole West.  As the boy thought of them with a swelling heart,—­for they had been kind to him,—­it seemed that they were braver than the hunters, more courageous than the soldiers.  Listening to the appeal of the Angelus stealing so tenderly through the twilight, with the strain of poetry that was in him thrilling in response, he felt that the prayers then going up must fill the cruel wilderness with holy incense; that the coming of these gentle Sisters must subdue the very wild beasts, as the presence of the lovely martyrs subdued the lions of old.