It may surprise some for me to say, if I could live life over I would be brought up in the same old state of Kentucky.  “With all her faults I love her still,” but not her stills.  It has been my privilege to visit every state in the union and I find all the good is not in any one state, nor all the bad.  While Kentucky has had her night riders, Missouri has had her boodlers, California her grafters, Illinois her anarchists, Pennsylvania her machine politics, New York her Tammany tiger, and Washington City her blizzards on inauguration days.  God doesn’t grow all the daisies in one field nor confine thorns to one thicket.

  It’s been my lot this land to roam,
  O’er every state twixt ocean’s foam,
  But still my heart clings to its home,
          Kentucky.

  I’ve traveled the prairies of the west,
  I’ve seen each section at its best,
  There’s nothing like my native nest,
          Kentucky.

  No matter through what state I pass,
  No matter how the people class,
  To me there’s only one Blue Grass,
          Kentucky.

  When my wanderings here are o’er,
  And my spirit seeks the golden shore,
  Then keep my dust for evermore,
          Kentucky.

Not only would I be brought up in Kentucky and in the country, but I would go to the same Yankee schoolmaster, have the same sweethearts and marry the same girl, provided she would consent to make another journey with the same companion.  By the way, we were married in Bourbon County, Kentucky, when she was nineteen and I twenty.  About four years ago we celebrated our golden wedding, and the morning after the celebration,

  She put on “her old grey bonnet,
  With the blue ribbon on it.” 
  We didn’t “hitch Dobbin to the Shay”
  But along the interurban
  We rode down to Bourbon,
  Where we started for our golden wedding day.

If I could live life over surely I could ask no better age than the one in which I have lived.  We no longer toil over a mountain, but glide through it on ribbons of steel; telegraphy dives the deep and brings us the news of the old world every morning before breakfast; we talk with tongues of lightning through telephones and send messages on ether waves over the sea; we ride horse-cycles that run, never walk and live without eating; we travel in carriages drawn by electric steeds that never tire; the signal service gives us a geography of the weather, so the farmer may know whether or not to prepare to plow, and the Sunday school whether to arrange or to postpone its picnic tomorrow; airships mount the heavens, steamships plough the ocean’s bosom, submarine torpedo boats undermine the deep with missiles of death, while photography turns one inside out, and doctors no longer guess at the location of a bullet.  All these things have come to pass within my life-time.  What may the young before me expect in the next fifty years?