Off to the south stretches away a great forest of walnut, oak and chestnut trees—­reminders of the vast forest that Daniel Boone knew.  Many of these trees were here then, and here let them remain, said Henry Clay.  And so today at Ashland, as at Hawarden, no tree is felled until it has been duly tried by the entire family and all has been said for and against the sentence of death.  I heard Miss McDowell make an eloquent plea for an old oak that had been rather recklessly harboring mistletoe and many squirrels, until it was thought probable that, like our first parents, it might have a fall.  It was a plea more eloquent than “O Woodman, spare that tree.”  A reprieve for a year was granted; and I thought, as I cast my vote on the side of mercy, that the jury that could not be won by such a young woman as that was hopelessly dead at the top and more hollow at the heart than the old oak under whose boughs we sat.

* * * * *

Ashland is just a mile south of the courthouse.  When Henry Clay used to ride horseback between the town and his farm there were scarce a dozen houses to pass on the way, but now the street is all built up, and is smartly paved, and the trolley-line booms a noisy car to the sacred gates every ten minutes.

Lexington was laid out in the year Seventeen Hundred Seventy-four, and the intention was to name it in honor of Colonel Patterson, the founder, or of Daniel Boone.  But while the surveyors were doing their work, word came of the battle of some British and certain embattled farmers, and the spirit of freedom promptly declared that the town should be called Lexington.

Three years after the laying-out of Lexington, Henry Clay was born.  He was the son of a poor and obscure Baptist preacher who lived at “The Slashes,” in Virginia.  The boy never had any vivid recollection of his father, who passed away when Henry was a mere child.

The mother had a hard time of it with her family of seven children, and if kind neighbors had not aided, there would have been actual want.  And surely one can not blame the widow for “marrying for a home” when opportunity offered.  Only one out of that first family ever achieved eminence, and the second brood is actually lost to us in oblivion.

Henry Clay was a graduate of the University of Hard Knocks; he also took several post-graduate courses at the same institution.  Very early in life we see that he possessed the fine, eager, receptive spirit that absorbs knowledge through the finger-tips; and the ability to think and to absorb is all that even college can ever do for a man.  I doubt whether college would have helped Clay, and it might have dimmed the diamond luster of his mind, and diluted that fine audacity which carried him on his way.  In this capacity to comprehend in the mass, Clay’s character was essentially feminine.  We have Thoreau for authority that the intuition and the sympathy found always in the saviors of the world are purely feminine attributes—­the legacy bequeathed from a mother who thirsted for better things.