The war removed one obstacle to the free movement of men desiring work and seeking agreeable homes, a movement marked in the great increase of the industrial population of Louisville and the awakening to varied industries and trade in western Kentucky. The offer of cheap land, which would reward skilful farming In agreeable climatic conditions, has attracted foreign settlers to the plateau south of the blue-grass region; and scientific investigation has made the mountain district in the south-east the object of the eager competition of both domestic and foreign capital. Kentucky, therefore, is entering upon a new era of development. Two phases of it, the Swiss colonies, and the opening of the coal, iron, and timber resources, present special points of interest. This Incoming of the commercial spirit will change Kentucky for the better and for the worse, will change even the tone of the blue-grass country, and perhaps take away something of that charm about which so much has been written. So thoroughly has this region been set forth by the pen and the pencil and the lens that I am relieved of the necessity of describing it. But I must confess that all I had read of it, all the pictures I had seen, gave me an inadequate idea of its beauty and richness. So far as I know, there is nothing like it in the world. Comparison of it with England is often made in the use of the words “garden” and “park.” The landscape is as unlike the finer parts of Old England as it is unlike the most carefully tended parts of New England. It has neither the intense green, the subdivisions in hedges, the bosky lanes, the picturesque cottages, the niceness of minute garden-culture, of England, nor the broken, mixed lawn gardening and neglected pastures and highways, with the sweet wild hills, of the Berkshire region. It is an open, elevated, rolling land, giving the traveller often the most extended views over wheat and clover, hemp and tobacco fields, forests and blue-grass pastures. One may drive for a hundred miles north and south over the splendid macadam turnpikes, behind blooded roadsters, at an easy ten-mile gait, and see always the same sight—a smiling agricultural paradise, with scarcely a foot, in fence corners, by the road-side, or in low grounds, of uncultivated, uncared-for land. The open country is more pleasing than the small villages, which have not the tidiness of the New England small villages; the houses are for the most part plain; here and there is a negro cabin, or a cluster of them, apt to be unsightly, but always in view somewhere is a plantation-house, more or less pretentious, generally old-fashioned and with the colonial charm. These are frequently off the main thoroughfare, approached by a private road winding through oaks and ash-trees, seated on some gentle knoll or slope, maybe with a small flower-garden, but probably with the old sentimental blooms that smell good and have reminiscences, in the