She scarcely sounded the _t_ in Kentucky, since she also was of the South, where the languid air tends to produce elisions.

The Carrolls came originally from Kentucky, and had lived there until after the births of the two daughters.

When they were scarcely more than infants, Arthur Carroll had experienced the petty and individual, but none the less real, cataclysm of experience which comes to most men sooner or later.

It is the earthquake of a unit, infinitesimal, but entirely complete of its kind, and possibly as far-reaching in its thread of consequences.
Arthur Carroll had had his palmy days, when he was working with great profits, and, as he believed, with entire righteousness and regard to his fellow-men, a coal-mine in the Kentucky mountains.

He had inherited it from his father, as the larger part of his patrimony.
When most of the property had been dissipated, at the time of the civil war, the elder Carroll, who was broken by years and reverses, used often to speak of this unimproved property of his, to his son Arthur, who was a young boy at the time.