The Choir Invisible

It was the morning of the wedding.

According to the usage of the time the marriage ceremony was to take place

early in the forenoon, in order that the guests, gathered in from distant

settlements of the wilderness, might have a day for festivity and still

reach home before night. Late in the afternoon the bridal couple, escorted

by many friends, were to ride into town to Joseph's house, and in the

evening there was to be a house-warming.

The custom of the backwoods country ran that a man must not be left to build

his house alone; and one day some weeks before this wagons had begun to roll

in from this direction and that

direction out of the forest, hauling the logs for Joseph's cabin.

Then with loud laughter and the writhing of tough backs and the straining of

powerful arms and legs, men old, middle-aged, and young had raised the house

like overgrown boys at play, and then had returned to their own neglected

business: so that to him was left only the finishing.He had finished it and

furnished it for the simple scant needs of pioneer life.But on this, his

wedding morning, he had hardly left the town, escorted by friends on

horseback, before many who had variously excused themselves from going began

to issue from their homes: women carrying rolls of linen and pones of bread;

boys with huge joints of jerked meat and dried tongues of the buffalo, bear,

and deer. There was a noggin, a piggin, a churn, a homemade chair; there was

a quilt from a grandmother and a pioneer cradle--a mere trough scooped out

of a walnut log.

An old pioneer sent the antlers of a stag for a hat-rack,

and a buffalo rug for the young pair to lie warm under of bitter, winter

nights; his wife sent a spinning-wheel and a bundle of shingles for

johnny-cakes. Some of the merchants gave packages of Philadelphia groceries;

some of the aristo-cratic families parted with heirlooms that had been

laboriously brought over the mountains--a cup and saucer of Sevres, a pair

of tall brass candlesticks, and a Venus -mirror framed in ebony.

It was about three o'clock in the afternoon when John Gray jumped on the back of a

strong trusty horse at the stable of the Indian Queen, leaned over to shake

the hands of the friends who had met there to see him off, and turned his

horse's head in the direction of the path that led to the Wilderness Road.

But when he had gone about a mile, he struck into the forest at right angles

and rode across the country until he reached that green woodland pathway

which led from the home of the Falconers to the public road between

Lexington and Frankfort. He tied his horse some distance away, and walking

back, sat down on the roots of an oak and waited.