stretch relentlessly ahead; I feel my heart
sink heavily as I hear again and again, "Got a teacher? Yes." So I
walked on--horses were too expensive--until I wandered beyond railways,
beyond stage lines, to a land of "varmints" and rattlesnakes, where the
coming of a stranger was an event, and men lived and died in the shadow
of one blue hill.

Sprinkled over hill and dale lay cabins and farmhouses, shut out from
the world by the forests and the rolling hills toward the east. There I
found at last a little school. Josie told me of it; she was a thin,
homely girl of twenty, with a dark-brown face and thick, hard hair. I
had crossed the stream at Watertown, and rested under the great willows;
then I had gone to the little cabin in the lot where Josie was resting
on her way to town. The gaunt farmer made me welcome, and Josie, hearing
my errand, told me anxiously that they wanted a school over the hill;
that but once since the war had a teacher been there; that she herself
longed to learn,--and thus she ran on, talking fast and loud, with much
earnestness and energy.

Next morning I crossed the tall round hill, lingered to look at the blue
and yellow mountains stretching toward the Carolinas, then plunged into
the wood, and came out at Josie's home. It was a dull frame cottage
with four rooms, perched just below the brow of the hill, amid peach
trees. The father was a quiet, simple soul, calmly ignorant, with no
touch of vulgarity. The mother was different,--strong, bustling, and
energetic, with a quick, restless tongue, and an ambition to live "like
folks."

There was a crowd of children. Two boys had gone away. There remained
two growing girls; a shy midget of eight; John, tall, awkward, and
eighteen; Jim, younger, quicker, and better looking; and two babies of
indefinite age. Then there was Josie herself. She seemed to be the
center of the family: always busy at service, or at home, or
berry-picking; a little nervous and inclined to scold, like her mother,
yet faithful, too, like her father. She had about her a certain
fineness, the shadow of an unconscious moral heroism that would
willingly give all of life to make life broader, deeper, and fuller for
her and hers.

I saw much of this family afterwards, and grew to love them for their
honest efforts to be decent and comfortable, and for their knowledge of
their own ignorance. There was with them no affectation. The mother
would scold the father for being so "easy"