A rude platform opposite the fireplace was the master's rostrum,
whereon was his high, box-like desk of pine and his split-bottomed
chair. Just back of his seat upon the floor of the platform stood a row
of dinner pails, and above on wooden pegs hung the children's hats and
bonnets. On each side of the room was a long writing-desk, merely a
rough board resting with the proper slant upon stout pins driven into
the walls. Here on rude, backless benches sat the larger boys and
girls. At the right-hand side of the room, on a lower bench in front of
the older pupils, sat the little boys "with curving backs and swinging
feet, and with eyes that beamed all day long with fun or apprehension."
Opposite them, on a similar bench, was a row of little girls in linsey
dresses and tow-linen pinafores.

Every grade of home was represented--the shiftless renter's squalid
hovel, the backwoods hunter's rude hut, the substantial log house of
the prosperous farmer, and the more pretentious dwelling of such men as
Gilcrest and Dunlap and Winston, who claimed kinship with the flower of
Virginian aristocracy.

In the pioneer schools grammar, history, geography, and the sciences,
if taught at all, were usually treated orally; but in the main,
spelling, reading, writing and arithmetic were the only branches
studied. As reading-charts for the little ones, the alphabet was pasted
upon broad hickory paddles which were frequently used for outside as
well as inside application of knowledge. Readers were coming into
vogue, but in most schools the pupils in reading advanced from
alphabetical paddle to spelling-book; from spelling-book to "Pilgrim's
Progress" or the Bible. Sometimes the Bible was the only reading-book
allowed by the parent, and many a child in those days learned to read
by wrestling with the jaw-breaking words in Kings and Chronicles; for,
as Bushrod Hinkson declared when he refused to buy a reader for his
son, "The Bible's 'nough tex'-book on readin', an' when a boy hez
learned to knock the pins frum undah all the big words in the 'Good
Book,' he'll be able to travel like a streak o' lightnin' through all
kinds o' print."

[Illustration: _Cane Ridge Meeting-house._]

CHAPTER III.

CANE RIDGE MEETING-HOUSE

The third Sunday in October was the regular once-a-month meeting-day at
Cane Ridge Church. Early in the morning a note of preparation was
sounded throughout the Rogers domain, and by nine o'clock the entire
househo