“In wondering what things would have befallen all these people had a lad’s ambition led them into a different life, I find myself treading paths of doubt.  Perhaps noble achievements might have resulted—­but I know that in remaining here they have made our land to blossom and to me it seems enough.  I can, for some reason, no more think of Thomas Burton transplanted without hurt than I can think of some great patriarch of the forest, which has buffeted storms and hail for decades, being uprooted and planted anew in a trim garden and a different clime.  Then he died, too—­

    “’And as he trod that day to God, so walked he from his birth,
    In simpleness and gentleness and honor and clean mirth.’”

The speaker talked deliberately.  At times his voice mounted into a sort of oratorical fire.  At times it fell until his listeners bent forward that they might miss none of his words.  Now and again he would stop altogether and his eyes would turn to the blue skies, and when they did a devout and intense light glowed in their pupils.  His hearers were simple and easily touched and an occasional sob came from the women.

“I said that Hamilton Burton died young,” he resumed.  “He died almost a boy with a boy’s youthful heart beating in his bosom.  If he could so bring out of desolation a land like this, while yet he was hardly a man in years, who can say that his dream of power was all a dream?  If he who never left these hills and never saw the world beyond save as he saw it in the exaltation of his flaming imagination, could do such things, what man can say that with maturity and opportunity he might not have become a Caesar?  But the feet of these people never trod beyond the nearer ways of a simple life.  Hamilton Burton burned to go out and try the eagle’s wings of his life.  He had won the acquiescence of his family.  He did not go.  None of them went.  They lived here and died here and they fought discontent, and to my mind they were conquerors of the earth.”

Once more there was a pause and after it came other words.

“I suppose that they all dreamed.  After the stress of that hurricane of powerful personality, with which the boy had won them to his heart’s desire, these people could never have again lived their simple lives without dreams coming—­and doubts.  To say, ‘God knows best,’ meant to repress the disturbing thoughts that must have often arisen.

“In these hills boys become men, and one boy became something more.  This was a family of beautiful and devoted love.  The brothers were what God meant brothers to be, friends whose hearts were linked.  For every member of this little group of one blood, all the others felt a mighty bond of affection.  And here they stayed.”  The four words might have been the text, and through the talk it ran with the insistence of a refrain, until it sank into the brain of every man and every woman who listened.

“Here they stayed, and if each one of them thought often of what may have been given up by that decision, no one of them said so.