He comes into the county court, this old African, because he is a colored Kentuckian and must honor the stable customs of the country. He does little buying or selling; he is not a politician; he has no debt to collect, and no legal business. Still, example is powerful and the negro imitative, so here he is at county court. It is one instance of the influence exerted over him by the institutions of the Kentuckian, so that he has a passion for fine stock, must build amphitheatres and hold fairs and attend races. Naturally, therefore, county court has become a great social day with his race. They stop work and come in from the country, or from the outskirts of the town, where they have congregated in little frame houses, and exhibit a quasi-activity in whatever of business and pleasure is going forward. In no other position of life does he exhibit his character and his condition more strikingly than here. Always comical, always tragical, light-hearted, sociable; his shackles stricken off, but wearing those of his own indolence, ignorance, and helplessness; the wandering Socrates of the streets, always dropping little shreds of observation on human affairs and bits of philosophy on human life; his memory working with last Sunday's sermon, and his hope with to-morrow's bread; citizen, with so much freedom and so little liberty--the negro forms one of the conspicuous features of a county court day at the present time. A wonderful, wonderful day this is that does thus always keep pace with civilization in the State, drawing all elements to itself, and portraying them to the interpreting eye. So that to paint the scenes of the county court days in the past is almost to write the history of the contemporary periods; and to do as much with one of the present hour is to depict the oldest influences that has survived and the newest that has been born in this local environment. To the future student of governmental and institutional history in this country, a study always interesting, always important, and always unique, will be county court day in Kentucky. KENTUCKY FAIRS I The nineteenth century opened gravely for the Kentuckians. Little akin as was the spirit of the people to that of the Puritans, life among them had been almost as granitic in its hardness and ruggedness and desolate unrelief. The only thing in the log-cabin that had sung from morning till night was the spinning-wheel. Not much behind those women but danger, anxiety, vigils, devastation, mournful tragedies; scarce one of them but might fitly have gone to her loom and woven herself a garment of sorrow. Not much behind those men but felling of trees, clearing of land, raising of houses, opening of roads, distressing problems of State, desolating wars of the republic. Most could remember the time when it was so common for a man to be killed, that to lie down and die a natural death seemed unnatural. Many must have had in their faces the sadness that was in the face of Lincoln.