The doctor sat there that morning trying to work at the books of the year. The rooms were comfortable; the children were away at the fireside of another man's wife; the servants did not dare disturb him; his horses waited in their stalls; it was the day on which he could begin to reap his golden harvest--a pleasant day for most men; but he could not see the blanks before him nor remember the names he filled in nor the figures that were for value received. Because there lay open before him the Book of the Years. And coming down toward him on the track of memory through this book was his life from boyhood to middle age: first the playing feet of the child that have no path as yet; then the straight path of the boy; then the winding road of youth; then the quickly widened road, so smooth, so easy, of a young man; and then the fixed deepening rut of middle age. And now the rut of middle age had come to its forks: north fork and south fork; or east fork and west fork--he must choose. Whoso cares to know where and how the doctor's life-path started and across what kind of country it had run until now, a middle-aged man, he sat there this day at the tragedy of its forking, may if he so choose follow the road by the chart of a narrative. But let him remember that this narrative goes back into a society unlike that of to-day and into a Kentucky that has vanished. Back there are other manners, other customs, other types of men: a different light on the world altogether. IV THE BOOK OF THE YEARS MORE than half a century ago, or during the decade of 1850 and 1860, when American life on the fertile plain of Kentucky attained its ripest flavor, there was living with great ease to himself and others on a large estate in one of the bluegrass counties a country gentleman and farmer who was nothing more: nothing more because that was enough. Being farmer took up much of his time, and being a gentleman took up the rest. He one day observed that his prolific heels were beginning to be trodden upon by a group of stalwart sons nearing manhood; or, in the idiom of that picturesque soil, all thickly bunched in their race for the grand stand. According to the robust family life of that era and people, a year or less was often the interval between births; and a father, slanting his eyes upward to his oldest who had just reached twenty-one, might catch a glimpse of a fourth son smiling loyally at him from the top of the rank stalk of eighteen.