The lines of contact between isolated clearings and meagre settlements were never wholly broken. Months might pass without a household seeing a strange face, but always some one was on the way--an itinerant missionary, a lost hunter, a pioneer looking for a new field to conquer. Motoring at ease through the country, one marvels at the journeys accomplished when blazed trails were the only highways. A pioneer railroad-builder once told me of a pilgrimage he made on horseback from northern Indiana to the Hermitage in Tennessee to meet Old Hickory face to face. Jackson had captivated his boyish fancy and this arduous journey was a small price to pay for the honor of viewing the hero on his own acres. I may add that this gentleman achieved his centennial, remaining a steadfast adherent of Jacksonian democracy to the end of his life. Once I accompanied him to the polls and he donned a silk hat for the occasion, as appropriate to the dignified exercise of his franchise. There was a distinct type of restless, adventurous pioneer who liked to keep a little ahead of civilization; who found that he could not breathe freely when his farm, acquainted for only a few years with the plough, became the centre of a neighborhood. Men of this sort persuaded themselves that there was better land to be had farther on, though, more or less consciously, it was freedom they craved. The exodus of the Lincolns from Kentucky through Indiana, where they lingered fourteen years before seeking a new home in Illinois, is typical of the pioneer restlessness. In a day when the effects of a household could be moved in one wagon and convoyed by the family on horseback, these transitions were undertaken with the utmost light-heartedness. Only a little while ago I heard a woman of eighty describe her family’s removal from Kentucky to Illinois, a wide détour being made that they might visit a distant relative in central Indiana. This, from her recital, must have been the jolliest of excursions, for the children at least, with the daily experiences of fording streams, the constant uncertainties as to the trail, and the camping out in the woods when no cabin offered shelter.