The Choir Invisible

After this the years were swept along. Fast came the changes in Kentucky.

The prophecy which John Gray had made to his school-children passed to its

realization and reality went far beyond it. In waves of migration, hundreds

upon hundreds of thousands of settlers of the Anglo-Saxon race hurried into

the wilderness and there jostled and shouldered each other in the race

passion of soil-owning and home-building; or always farther westward they

rushed, pushing the Indian back.

Lexington became the chief manufacturing

town of the new civilization, thronged by merchants and fur-clad traders;

gathered into it were men and women making a society that would have been

brilliant in the capitals of the East; at its bar were heard illustrious

voices, the echoes of which are not yet dead, are past all dying; the genius

of young Jouett found for itself the secret of painting canvases so luminous

and true that never since in the history of the State have they been

equalled; the Transylvania University arose with lecturers famous enough to

be known in Europe: students of law and medicine travelled to it from all

parts of the land.

John Gray's school-children grew to be men and women. For the men there were

no longer battles to fight in Kentucky, but there were the wars of the

Nation; and far away on the widening boundaries of the Republic they

conquered or failed and fell; as volunteers with Perry in the victory on

Lake Erie; in the awful massacre at the River Raisin; under Harrison at the

Thames; in the mud and darkness of the Mississippi at New Orleans, repelling

Pakenham's charge with Wellington's veteran, victory-flushed campaigners.

The school-master's friend, the parson, he too had known his more peaceful

warfare, having married and become a manifold father. Of a truth it was

feared at one period that the parson was running altogether to prayers and

daughters. For it was remarked that with each birth, his petitions seemed

longer and his voice to rise from behind the chancel with a fresh wail as of

one who felt a growing grievance both against himself and the almighty.

Howbeit, innocently enough after the appearance of the fifth female infant,

one morning he preached the words: "No man knoweth what manner of creature

he is"; and was unaware that a sudden smile rippled over the faces of his

hearers.

But it was not until later on when mother and six were packed into

one short pew at morning service, that they became known in a body as the

parson's Collect for all Sundays.

Sometimes the little ones were divided and part of them sat in another pew

where there was a single occupant--a woman--childless.