few home-made articles of furniture, comprise the whole. The home is
begun when its founders are yet children. Ignorant and poor, the boy
has "took up" with the girl, and it may be they are legally married. A
building-bee is announced, a little cabin erected, a few pigs bought
or given, a few trees girdled, some corn planted, in so crude and
shiftless a way that even an Indian, in his first attempts at farming,
would be ashamed to own it, and home life is begun. Into this home of
poverty and ignorance come the children. The families are
large--eight, ten, twelve, and sometimes more. The mother is too
ignorant herself to instruct, and had she the ability, neither time
nor strength to accomplish it are at her command. Life to her is a
struggle. At twenty she looks thirty-five, at thirty-five she is old.
Always she has a tired, hopeless expression, which simply to look at
almost starts the tears. The children have something of the same
expression; the babies even seem to realize that it is a sober, sad
world they have come into. I do not remember seeing a laughing, cooing
baby in all the cabins I visited.

[Illustration: MOUNTAIN CABIN.]

[Illustration: MOUNTAIN CABIN.]

Educationally, I found this people far below the emigrant on the
prairie. Seventy per cent. of the whole two millions cannot read or
write. The schools are the poorest. The school houses are built of logs;
a hole is cut for the window; the ground serves for a floor, slabs for
seats, and the teacher is strictly in keeping with all. Bare-footed,
hair unkempt, snuff stick in her mouth, scarcely able to read herself,
she is the example--the ideal toward which her pupils are to strive.