Years passed. History came and went its thundering way, leaving the nation like a forest blasted with lightning and drenched with rain. The Kentucky gentleman of the feudal sort was gone, having disappeared in the clouds of that history which had swept him from the landscape. The mild young Kentucky breeder mellowed to his middle years, winning and losing on the road as we all must, but with never a word about it one way or the other from him; early losing his wife and winning the makeshifts of widowerhood, entering so to speak upon its restrictions; losing his little daughter and winning a nephew whom he adopted and idolized; letting him run wild over the house, and then about the yard, and then about the farm, and then across boundary fences into other farms, and then into the towns, and then out into the world. There were parts of his farm that looked like English downs; and on these fed Southdown sheep; for the Kentucky country gentleman of that period killed his own mutton. (He killed pretty much his own everything, even his own neighbors.) No saddle of mutton out of a public market house for him and for his groaning mahogany. And so it seemed well-nigh a romantic coincidence that the fatherless, motherless boy who came to play on these downs should have arrived there with the name of Downs Birney. The Kentucky turfman, with his Southdown sheep and Durham cattle and White Berkshire hogs and thoroughbred horses and Blue-dorking chickens, was born, as may already have been observed, with that Southern indolence which occasionally equals the Oriental's; and as more time passed he settled into the deeper imperturbability of men who commit their destiny to fast horses. Apparently they early become so inoculated with hazard as to end in being immune to all excitement. As he could stroll over his farm without having to climb a hill, he had perhaps preferred to build him a low manor house so that he could lounge over it without having to take the trouble to go upstairs. In the chosen business of his life it would appear that he had wished to avail himself of a principle of Old Roman law: that he who does a thing through another does it himself; and thus he could sit perfectly still on his veranda with two legs and run nearly a mile a minute on a track with four. A rural Kentucky gentleman of dead-ripe local pre-bellum flavor: exhaling a kind of Falernian bouquet as he dwelt under the serene blue sky on a beautiful bluegrass Sabine farm: a warm-visaged, soft-handed, bland-voiced man--so bland that when he strolled up to you and accosted you, you were uncertain whether he was going to offer to bet with you or to baptize you. Season after season this tranquil happy Kentuckian dwelt there, intent upon making nothing of himself and upon making the horse an adequate citizen of a state that likes to go its own gait--and to make him a leading citizen of the world: measurably he succeeded in doing both.