he phrase they used, just as in all wilderness life it is
the phrase with which men speak of journeys from the solitudes.

When Miss Shorte went east or west, she carried to the outer world a
living and vivid portraiture of that folk immured behind the ridge and
its elder life. Then somehow the undertakings, absurdly impractical from
a material viewpoint, realized themselves, and a new school building, a
tiny hospital or a needed dormitory rose among the hardwood and the
pines of Marlin County.

In the fall of 1913 Miss Shorte brought east with her a younger woman
also from the school, to sing for her audiences those quaint
"song-ballets" that sound around smoky mountain hearths to the
accompaniment of banjo and "dulcimore."

Because no dollar could go out from the school's closely guarded
treasury without assurance that it would bring other dollars back, the
experiment of increasing the traveling expenses by including this girl
in the journey to New York had been discussed back of Cedar Mountain
with prayerful earnestness, and the girl herself had greeted the final
decision as one of the great moments of her life.

Now that girl stood beside the piano a little tremulous with stage
fright as she looked out over an audience more sophisticated than any to
which she had ever sung before. It was in one of the women's university
clubs in the Forties and to her uninitiated eye the light fell on a
confusing display of evening dress and worldly-wise faces full of
self-containment.

They would listen with politeness but how could her offering interest
these men and women to whom great voices were familiar? Hers was
untrained and the songs were crude vehicles for folk-lore compositions,
plaintive with uncultivated minors.

That elderly gentleman, sitting far back near the door, had been
identified to her in a whisper. He was a music critic whose word carried
the force of authority--and she wondered if he sat near the exit with
thought of escape from her inflictions. Just now he was writing a series
of magazine articles on folk-lore music in America, and the girl felt
herself the subject of a cold experiment in mental vivisection.

The lady with the white pompadour was one whose name she had known with
awe on the school's list of patronesses and even here in New York it was
a great name.

The mountain singer's knees trembled a little as the accompanist struck
the keys, and her first note stole out, sweetly clear and natur