Sounded to its depths, the serene sea in which their existence floats will reveal a bottom, not of mercantile, but of social ideas; studied as to cost or comfort, the architecture in which the people have expressed themselves will appear noticeable, not in their business houses and public buildings, but in their homes. If these towns pique themselves pointedly on anything, it is that they are the centres of genial intercourse and polite entertainment. Even commercial Louisville must find its peculiar distinction in the number of its sumptuous private residences. It is wellnigh a rule that in Kentucky the value of the house is out of proportion to the value of the estate. But if the towns regard themselves as the provincial fortresses of good society, they do not look down upon the home life of the country. Between country and town in Kentucky exists a relation unique and well to be studied: such a part of the population of the town owning or managing estates in the country; such a part of the population of the country being business or professional men in town. For it is strikingly true that here all vocations and avocations of life may and do go with tillage, and there are none it is not considered to adorn. The first Governor of the State was awarded his domain for raising a crop of corn, and laid down public life at last to renew his companionship with the plough. "I retire," said Clay, many years afterwards, "to the shades of Ashland." The present Governor (1888), a man of large wealth, lives, when at home, in a rural log-house built near the beginning of the century. His predecessor in office was a farmer. Hardly a man of note in all the past or present history of the State but has had his near or immediate origin in the woods and fields. Formerly it was the custom--less general now--that young men should take their academic degrees in the colleges of the United States, sometimes in those of Europe, and, returning home, hang up their diplomas as votive offerings to the god of boundaries. To-day you will find the ex-minister to a foreign court spending his final years in the solitude of his farm-house, and the representative at Washington making his retreat to the restful homestead. The banker in town bethinks him of stocks at home that know no panic; the clergyman studies St. Paul amid the native corn, and muses on the surpassing beauty of David as he rides his favorite horse through green pastures and beside still waters.