It was a day to make glad the heart of slave or freeman.The earth was cool from a night-long rain,and a gentle breeze fanned coolness from the north all day long.The clouds were snow-white,tumbling,ever-moving,and between them the sky showed blue and deep.Grass,leaf,weed and flower were in the richness that comes to the green things of the earth just before that full tide of summer whose foam is drifting thistle down.The air was clear and the mountains seemed to have brushed the haze from their faces and drawn nearer that they,too,might better see the doings of that day.
From the four winds of heaven,that morning,came the brave and the free.Up from Lee,down from Little Stone Gap,and from over in Scott,came the valley-farmers--horseback,in buggies,hacks,two-horse wagons,with wives,mothers,sisters,sweethearts,in white dresses,flowered hats,and many ribbons,and with dinner-baskets stuffed with good things to eat--old ham,young chicken,angel-cake and blackberry wine--to be spread in the sunless shade of great poplar and oak.From Bum Hollow and Wildcat Valley and from up the slopes that lead to Cracker's Neck came smaller tillers of the soil--as yet but faintly marked by the gewgaw trappings of the outer world;while from beyond High Knob,whose crown is in cloud-land,and through the Gap,came the mountaineer in the primitive simplicity of home spun and cowhide,wide-brimmed hat and poke-bonnet,quaint speech,and slouching gait.Through the Gap he came in two streams--the Virginians from Crab Orchard and Wise and Dickinson,the Kentuckians from Letcher and feudal Harlan,beyond the Big Black--and not a man carried a weapon in sight,for the stern spirit of that Police Guard at the Gap was respected wide and far.Into the town,which sits on a plateau some twenty feet above the level of the two rivers that all but encircle it,they poured,hitching their horses in the strip of woods that runs through the heart of the place,and broad ens into a primeval park that,fan-like,opens on the oval level field where all things happen on the Fourth of July.