In point of fact, its platitudes "stick in my gizzard." I belong the rather to those old-fashioned ones-- "Who love their land because it is their own, And scorn to give aught other reason why; Who'd shake hands with a king upon his throne, And think it kindness to his majesty." I have many rights--birthrights--to speak of Kentucky as a Kentuckian, beside that of more than fifty years' service upon what may be fairly called the battle-line of the Dark and Bloody Ground.
My grandmother's father, William Mitchell Morrison, had raised a company of riflemen in the War of the Revolution, and, after the War, marched it westward.

He commanded the troops in the old fort at Harrodsburg, where my grandmother was born in 1784.

He died a general.

My grandfather, James Black's father, the Rev.James Black, was chaplain of the fort.

He remembered the birth of the baby girl who was to become his wife.