After this the years were swept along. Fast came the changes in Kentucky.
The prophecy which John Gray had made to his school-children passed to its
realization and reality went far beyond it. In waves of migration, hundreds
upon hundreds of thousands of settlers of the Anglo-Saxon race hurried into
the wilderness and there jostled and shouldered each other in the race
passion of soil-owning and home-building; or always farther westward they
rushed, pushing the Indian back.

Lexington became the chief manufacturing
town of the new civilization, thronged by merchants and fur-clad traders;
gathered into it were men and women making a society that would have been
brilliant in the capitals of the East; at its bar were heard illustrious
voices, the echoes of which are not yet dead, are past all dying; the genius
of young Jouett found for itself the secret of painting canvases so luminous
and true that never since in the history of the State have they been
equalled; the Transylvania University arose with lecturers famous enough to
be known in Europe: students of law and medicine travelled to it from all
parts of the land.

John Gray's school-children grew to be men and women. For the men there were
no longer battles to fight in Kentucky, but there were the wars of the
Nation; and far away on the widening boundaries of the Republic they
conquered or failed and fell; as volunteers with Perry in the victory on
Lake Erie; in the awful massacre at the River Raisin; under Harrison at the
Thames; in the mud and darkness of the Mississippi at New Orleans, repelling
Pakenham's charge with Wellington's veteran, victory-flushed campaigners.