And with King Tobacco were coming his own human vassals that were to prove a new social discord in the land—­up from the river-bottoms of the Ohio and down from the foot-hills of the Cumberland—­to plant, worm, tend, and fit those yellow robes to be stuffed into the mouth of the world and spat back again into the helpless face of the earth.  And these vassals were supplanting native humanity as the plant was supplanting the native products of the soil.  And with them and the new king were due in time a train of evils to that native humanity, creating disaffection, dividing households against themselves, and threatening with ruin the lordly social structure itself.

But, for all this, the land that early September morning was a land of peace and plenty, and in field, meadow, and woodland the most foreign note of the landscape was a spot of crimson in the crotch of a high staked and ridered fence on the summit of a little hill, and that spot was a little girl.  She had on an old-fashioned poke-bonnet of deep pink, her red dress was of old-fashioned homespun, her stockings were of yarn, and her rough shoes should have been on the feet of a boy.  Had the vanished forests and cane-brakes of the eighteenth century covered the land, had the wild beasts and wild men come back to roam them, had the little girl’s home been a stockade on the edge of the wilderness, she would have fitted perfectly to the time and the scene, as a little daughter of Daniel Boone.  As it was, she felt no less foreign than she looked, for the strangeness of the land and of the people still possessed her so that her native shyness had sunk to depths that were painful.  She had a new ordeal before her now, for in her sinewy little hands were a paper bag, a first reader, and a spelling-book, and she was on her way to school.  Beneath her the white turnpike wound around the hill and down into a little hollow, and on the crest of the next low hill was a little frame house with a belfry on top.  Even while she sat there with parted lips, her face in a tense dream and her eyes dark with dread and indecision, the bell from the little school-house clanged through the still air with a sudden, sharp summons that was so peremptory and personal that she was almost startled from her perch.  Not daring to loiter any longer, she leaped lightly to the ground and started in breathless haste up and over the hill.  As she went down it, she could see horses hitched to the fence around the yard and school-children crowding upon the porch and filing into the door.  The last one had gone in before she reached the school-house gate, and she stopped with a thumping heart that quite failed her then and there, for she retreated backward through the gate, to be sure that no one saw her, crept along the stone wall, turned into a lane, and climbed a worm fence into the woods behind the school-house.  There she sat down on a log, miserably alone, and over the sunny strange slopes of this new world, on over the