The Choir Invisible

The evening of the ball had come at last.Not far from John's school on the

square stood another log cabin, from which another and much more splendid

light streamed out across the wilderness: this being the printing room and

book-bindery of the great Mr. John Bradford.

His portrait, scrutinized now from the distance and at the disadvantage of a hundred years, hands him down

to posterity as a bald-headed man with a seedy growth of hair sprouting

laterally from his temples, so that his ears look like little flat-boats

half hidden in little canebrakes; with mutton-chop whiskers growing far up

on the overhanging ledges of his cheek-bones and suggesting rather a daring

variety of lichen; with a long arched nose, running on its own hook in a

southwesterly direction; one eye a little higher than the other; a

protruding upper lip, as though he had behind it a set of the false teeth of

the time, which were fixed into the jaws by springs and hinges, all but

compelling a man to keep his mouth shut by main force; and a very short neck

with an overflowing jowl which weighed too heavily on his high shirt collar.

Despite his maligning portrait a foremost personage of his day, of

indispensable substance, of invaluable port: Revolutionary soldier, Indian

warrior; editor and proprietor of the Kentucky Gazette, the first newspaper

in the wilderness; binder of its first books--some of his volumes still

surviving on musty, forgotten shelves; senatorial elector; almanac-maker,

taking his ideas from the greater Mr. Franklin of Philadelphia, as Mr.

Franklin may have derived his from the still greater Mr. Jonathan Swift of

London; appointed as chairman of the board of trustees to meet the first

governor of the State when he had ridden into the town three years before

and in behalf of the people of the new commonwealth which had been carried

at last triumphantly into the Union, to bid his excellency welcome in an

address conceived in the most sonorous English of the period; and afterwards

for many years author of the now famous "Notes," which will perhaps make his

name immortal among American historians.

On this evening of the ball at the home of General James Wilkinson, the

great Mr. Bradford was out of town, and that most unluckily; for the

occasion--in addition to all the pleasure that it would furnish to the

ladies--was designed as a means of calling together the leaders of the

movement to separate Kentucky from the Union; and the idea may have been,

that the great Mr. Bradford, having written one fine speech to celebrate her

entrance, could as easily turn out a finer one to celebrate her withdrawal.