,
although I started to school. Yes'm, I started along of the rest, but
they told me it was a Yankee teacher and I was 'fraid, so when I got
most to the schoolhouse I hid in the bushes with my spelling-book, so
that is all the learning I ever got. But my mother was an eddicated
woman, yes'm, she could both read and write. I have the Bible she give
me yit. Yes'm, you jist wait and I'll show you." After some rummaging
in a box he came back with a small leather-bound Bible with print so
small it was hard to read. After turning to the record of births and
deaths he handed it to me, his wrinkled old face shining with pride as
he said, "There, my mother wrote that with her own hand." I took the
book and after a little deciphered that "Zebulon Pike Parker was born
Feb. 10, 1830," written in the stiff, difficult style of long ago and
written with pokeberry ink. He said his mother used to read about some
"old feller that was jist covered with biles," so I read Job to him,
and he was full of surprise they didn't "git some cherry bark and some
sasparilly and bile it good and gin it to him."

He had a side room to his cabin, which was his bedroom; so that night
he spread down a buffalo robe and two bearskins before the fire for
Jerrine and me. After making sure there were no moths in them, I spread
blankets over them and put a sleepy, happy little girl to bed, for he
had insisted on making molasses candy for her because they happened to
be born on the same day of the month. And then he played the fiddle
until almost one o'clock. He played all the simple, sweet, old-time
pieces, in rather a squeaky, jerky way, I am afraid, but the music
suited the time and the place.

Next morning he called me early and when I went out I saw such a
beautiful sunrise, well worth the effort of coming to see. I had
thought his cabin in a canon, but the snow had deceived me, for a few
steps from the door the mountains seemed to drop down suddenly for
several hundred feet and the first of the snow peaks seemed to lie
right at our feet. Around its base is a great swamp, in which the swamp
pines grow very thickly and from which a vapor was rising that got
about halfway up the snow peak all around. Fancy to yourself a big
jewel-box of dark green velvet lined with silver chiffon, the snow peak
lying like an immense opal in its center and over all the amber light
of a new day. That is what it looked most like.

Well, we next went to the corral, where I was