of royalty. Not the royalty of caste and court and station with
their glittering pretenses of superiority and their superficial claims
to distinction,--I do not mean that; I mean that true royalty which
needs no caste or court or station but makes itself felt because it IS.

She did not notice me at first, for the noise of the children at play in
the yard covered the sound of my approach, and she was looking far, far
away, over the river which lay below at the foot of the hill; over the
forest-clad mountains in the glory of their brown and gold; over the
vast sweep of the tree-crowned Ozark ridges that receded wave after wave
into the blue haze until, in the vastness of the distant sky, they were
lost. And something made me know that, in the moment's respite from her
task, the woman was looking even beyond the sky itself.

Her profile, clean-chiselled, but daintily formed, was beautiful in its
gentle strength. Her hair was soft and silvery like the gray mist of the
river in the morning. Then she turned to greet me, and I saw her eyes.
Boy that I was then, and not given overmuch to serious thought, I knew
that the high, unwavering purpose, the loving sympathy, and tender
understanding that shone in the calm depth of those eyes could belong
only to one who habitually looks unafraid beyond all earthly scenes.
Only those who have learned thus to look beyond the material horizon of
our little day have that beautiful inner light which shone in the eyes
of Auntie Sue--the teacher of a backwoods school.

Auntie Sue had come to the Elbow Rock neighborhood the summer preceding
that fall when I first met her. She had grown too old, she said, with
her delightful little laugh, to be of much use in the larger schools of
the more thickly populated sections of the country. But she was still
far too young, she stoutly maintained, to be altogether useless.

Tom Warden, who lived just over the ridge from the schoolhouse, and
who was blessed with the largest wife, the largest family, and the most
pretentious farm in the county, had kinsfolk somewhere in Illinois.
Through these relatives of the Ozark farmer Miss Susan Wakefield had
learned of the needs of the Elbow Rock school, and so, finally, had
come into the hills. It was the influential Tom who secured for her the
modest position. It was the motherly Mrs. Tom who made her at home in
the Warden household. It was the Warden boys and girls who first called
her "Auntie Sue." But it was A