Miss Judy was not sure that it was called so when she entered it, an infant in her father's arms. She always thought it more likely that the whole of Kentucky may still have been known as The Dark and Bloody Ground, so great were still the sufferings of the brave men and braver women who were still giving their lives to redeem it from darkness and blood. But there never was the slightest doubt in Miss Judy's mind that these gentle-people coming now were braver than any who had come before--the bravest because they were the gentlest. It always made her own gentle heart beat, as if to strains of martial music, to be told in the little mother's soft voice of the leaving of the broad-horn's frail protection, and of the undaunted plunge into the depths of the wilderness. Yet there were dangers there to be met which courage itself must flee from. These fearless Virginians who did not shrink from facing savages, nor from encountering wild beasts, shrank and fled appalled before the more frightful dangers then lurking all along the banks of the lower Ohio. There, hidden under the beauty of the almost tropical vegetation, was the hideous rack of the fever and ague, waiting ready to torture the strength out of the men, the heart out of the women, and the very lives out of the children. There, beneath the noble trees and above the wide open spaces, rolling like gentle prairies--sunlit, flower filled, so richly covered with wild strawberries that the horses' hoofs were dyed rosy-red--there the deadly mystery of "the milk-sickness" was already spreading its invisible shroud over the whole beautiful land. Fleeing from these perils more to be feared than the cruelest savages, and more to be dreaded than the fiercest wild beasts, the travellers went further into the heart of the wilderness, seeking the safety of higher ground; on and on, following the buffalo tracks which still traversed the country from end to end like broad, hard-beaten highways. One of these led them along a range of hills and into a fertile little valley, and it was here that the Virginians finally found a resting-place. It was here in this vale of rest, folded between these quiet hills, that the village of Oldfield grew out of that settlement, and here that it stands to-day scarcely altered from its beginning. Over the hills--there on the east where tender green of the crowning trees melts into the tenderer blue of the arching clouds--there still lies the untouched strip of broad brown earth, which the people of to-day call the Wilderness Road, just as those wandering Virginians called it when they first found it.