For indeed almost five years had gone by since the warm
summer night when I rode into New Orleans with Mrs. Temple. And in all
that time I had not so much as laid eyes on my cousin and dearest friend,
her son. I searched New Orleans for him in vain, and learned too late
that he had taken passage on a packet which had dropped down the river
the next morning, bound for Charleston and New York.
I have an instinct that this is not the place to relate in detail what
occurred to me before leaving New Orleans. Suffice it to say that I made
my way back through the swamps, the forests, the cane-brakes of the
Indian country, along the Natchez trail to Nashville, across the barrens
to Harrodstown in Kentucky, where I spent a week in that cabin which had
so long been for me a haven of refuge. Dear Polly Ann! She hugged me as
though I were still the waif whom she had mothered, and wept over the
little presents which I had brought the children. Harrodstown was
changed, new cabins and new faces met me at every turn, and Tom, more
disgruntled than ever, had gone a-hunting with Mr. Boone far into the
wilderness.
I went back to Louisville to take up once more the struggle for practice,
and I do not intend to charge so much as a page with what may be called
the even tenor of my life. I was not a man to get into trouble on my own
account.
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