It was a cold, raw March day, and Jackson, the Fighter and Doer of Great Deeds, was old and tired. The woman he worshiped had died and his heart was broken. His children and the friends of his youth had gone too. And so this neighbor saw the picture I want some great master to paint for the coming ages—the most beautiful, soul-telling picture that could be painted for the world. The old warrior sitting by the big hickory fire of the Hermitage. He loved little children and a little child, an adopted grandchild, had climbed up on his knee. But the little fellow had found a half-frozen, motherless lamb in the meadow and he would not “be good” unless the old fighter took his playmate, the lamb, too. And there he sat with both of them in his arms and up against his big, great, game, kind heart, that loved so the fields and the farm and the sweet, quiet things of life, but whom God had sent to fight the bullets and the bullies of his day and generation. For Greatness is a hermit that must suffer and be sacrificed. And the burden placed on it to do, is not the thing it would love to do. Let us look now at Jackson’s land. Let us see it as it was to a raw boy when he came over the mountains of North Carolina to make his home here. Aeons and ages ago, when the earth was young, there burst upon the banks of the Cumberland one of the many thousands of sulphur springs which an All-wise Physician said would be good for the health of beings, both beast and human, who should, through countless ages, inhabit the land. The pioneers called it “The Great Salt Lick,” the “French Lick,” because before ever the American hunter and trapper had arrived the French had been there. They all called it a lick because all wild animals licked it. Pioneers have a quick way of naming things and a way that went to the heart of things. Countless herds of bison and deer had claimed the lick as theirs long before ever the sound of a human voice had been heard in the great forests which towered above it, or echoed from the canoe on the beautiful river that flowed by it. For animals were on the earth before man; and untold generations of buffalo, elk and deer told it, in their own way, to untold generations which came after them, of the health-giving salty-sulphurous water which bubbled from the low bottom, amid the cane and beneath the big, cool trees on the river banks. And it became history and tradition to them.