This was Kit's favorite ancestor, John Carisbrook.

He had wandered far through the west, and had married a girl in one of the outlying settlements along the Ohio River, a girl with French blood in her, Gabrielle de la Chapelle.

Kit always liked to believe that it was from these two she had received her love of adventure, and of trail blazing.
She had never felt an affinity with "haunts of ancient peace" like Jean and Helen.

Only that week she had been reading in one of the Dean's early English histories of real rooftrees.

How, in the earliest times, primitive people built their houses around some selected giant oak or other king of the forest, with the massive trunk itself upholding the structure.