"The morning of the twenty-fourth of December a quarter of a century ago opened upon the vast plateau of central Kentucky as a brilliant but bitter day-with a wind like the gales of March.

Out in a neighborhood of one of the wealthiest and most thickly settled counties, toward the middle of the forenoon, two stumpy figures with movements full of health and glee appeared on a hilltop of the treeless . . ."

A middle aged country doctor takes a memory trip down the lane where his personal and professional lives were forever intertwined with each other.

James Lane Allen (1849-1925) was an American novelist and short story writer whose work, including the novel A Kentucky Cardinal, often depicted the culture and dialects of his native Kentucky.

His work is characteristic of the late-19th century local color era, when writers sought to capture the vernacular in their fiction.

Allen has been described as "Kentucky's first important novelist."