sted
all Steve's best endeavour. Mountain children are apt to know the
taste of liquor from babyhood, but Steve had never liked it and
neither had his mother. Occasionally parents, especially fathers, when
they visited the school would bring the children bottles of
"moonshine" to hide and drink from as they pleased, and the teachers
found Steve a great helper, though his corps of "regulators" could not
always be relied upon.

In the midst of his interesting, new surroundings Steve's mind often
went back to the rock where Tige lay and to the grave of his "mammy."
How pleased she would be, he thought again and again,--maybe she
was--that he was where he could "larn things."

He soon began to write letters to Mr. Polk, and a steady improvement
was noted all winter in these letters. There was always a great deal
in them about Miss Grace, for she seemed to make him her special
charge and the two were great friends. She loved to walk in the woods
and talk with Steve, hearing him tell many interesting things which he
had learned from intimate association with birds and animals.
Sometimes she would take his hand at the top of a hill and together
they would race down, laughing and breathless to the bottom. After
such a run, one day, they halted by the bank of a stream beneath one
of the grand old beeches for which Kentucky is famous.

"Oh, Steve," she exclaimed enthusiastically, "what a beautiful old
beech this is. How symmetrical its giant trunk, how perfect its
development of each branch and twig, while it pushes up into the sky
higher than all its fellows, gets more sunshine than all the rest, has
the prettiest growth of ferns and violets at its base,--and I just
know the birds and squirrels love it best!"

Miss Grace had a bubbling, contagious enthusiasm, and Steve followed
her expressive gestures as she pointed out each detail of perfection
with answering admiration.

"Steve!" She turned suddenly and bent her eyes upon him with still
more radiant emphasis. "I want you to be just such a grand specimen of
a man! Big and strong and well developed,--pushing up into the sky
further than all the rest about you, getting more sunshine than any
one else--making little plants to grow and blossom all about you and
drawing to you the sweetest and best in life!"

He smiled back into her shining eyes, somewhat bewildered, but with an
earnest:

"I shore will try, Miss Grace, but I don't know just what you mean."

"I mean I want