in the wilderness, and so moved onwards, like their less thrifty and more uneasy brethren, the men who half-cleared their lands and half-built their cabins.  But, as a rule, these better-class settlers were not mere life-long pioneers.  They wished to find good land on which to build, and plant, and raise their big families of healthy children, and when they found such land they wished to make thereon their permanent homes.  They did not share the impulse which kept their squalid, roving fellows of the backwoods ever headed for the vague beyond.  They had no sympathy with the feeling which drove these humbler wilderness-wanderers always onwards, and made them believe, wherever they were, that they would be better off somewhere else, that they would be better off in that somewhere which lay in the unknown and untried.  On the contrary, these thriftier settlers meant to keep whatever they had once grasped.  They got clear title to their lands.  Though they first built cabins, as soon as might be they replaced them with substantial houses and barns.  Though they at first girdled and burnt the standing timber, to clear the land, later they tilled it as carefully as any farmer of the seaboard States.  They composed the bulk of the population, and formed the backbone and body of the State.  The McAfees may be taken as a typical family of this class.

    The Gentry.

Yet a fourth class was composed of the men of means, of the well-to-do planters, merchants, and lawyers, of the men whose families already stood high on the Atlantic slope.  The Marshalls were such men; and there were many other families of the kind in Kentucky.  Among them were an unusually large proportion of the families who came from the fertile limestone region of Botetourt County in Virginia, leaving behind them, in the hands of their kinsmen, their roomy, comfortable houses, which stand to this day.  These men soon grew to take the leading places in the new commonwealth.  They were of good blood—­using the words as they should be used, as meaning blood that has flowed through the veins of generations of self-restraint and courage and hard work, and careful training in mind and in the manly virtues.  Their inheritance of sturdy and self-reliant manhood helped them greatly; their blood told in their favor as blood generally does tell when other things are equal.  If they prized intellect they prized character more; they were strong in body and mind, stout of heart, and resolute of will.  They felt that pride of race which spurs a man to effort, instead of making him feel that he is excused from effort.  They realized that the qualities they inherited from their forefathers ought to be further developed by them as their forefathers had originally developed them.  They knew that their blood and breeding, though making it probable that they would with proper effort succeed, yet entitled them to no success which they could not fairly earn in open contest with their rivals.