The birthplace of Harold and Elizabeth was one of the thousands and thousands of plain American homes in Kentucky and elsewhere that are the breeding-grounds and fortresses of the Republic's impregnable virtue. The house had never taught them a bad lesson; it had never offered them an architectural trait to which their own coarser human traits could attach themselves. It had never uttered a suggestion that there is anything wrong in the human nature dwelling within it or human nature approaching it from without. It was built against one enemy--the climate. And whenever the climate began war on the house, the children had a chance to see how well prepared for war it was: the climate always retreated, whipped in the end. Their land was like their birthplace. The earliest generations of little white Kentuckians had good reason to dread their country--no children anywhere ever had more. It was their Dark Ages. Death encompassed them. Torture snatched them from the breast. Terror cradled them. But all that was good and great in their parents fought on their side; and through the Dark Ages of the West shone the lustre of a new chivalry. But all that was changed long ago--changed except to history; and to gratitude which is the memory of the heart. On these plains of Kentucky no wildness any more, nothing unknown lurking anywhere: a deep strong land completely gentled but not weakened; over it drifting the lights and shadows of tranquil skies; and throbbing always in the heart of it a passion of tenderness that draws its wandering children back across all distances and through all years. Ay, there were three great spirits that walked with the lad that day and with the uncounted army of his peers; the spirit of their race--the old Anglo-Saxon race that has made its best share of the world's history by cutting away with its sword the rotting curtains that conceal sham and superstition; the spirit of his country which moves with resistless strength toward the real and the strong; and the spirit of the plain American home--that fortress where the real and the ideal meet. II FOUR IN A CAGE