dog, men, and sheep were moving in a cloud of dust around a bend in the road
and little Melissa was at the gate.

"Take good keer of 'Lissy," said the mother from the porch, kindly; and Chad,
curiously touched all at once by the trust shown him, stalked ahead like a
little savage, while Melissa with her basket followed silently behind. The boy
never thought of taking the basket himself: that is not the way of men with
women in the hills and not once did he look around or speak on the way up the
river and past the blacksmith's shop and the grist-mill just beyond the mouth
of Kingdom Come; but when they arrived at the log school-house it was his turn
to be shy and he hung back to let Melissa go in first. Within, there was no
floor but the bare earth, no window but the cracks between the logs, and no
desks but the flat sides of slabs, held up by wobbling pegs. On one side were
girls in linsey and homespun: some thin, undersized, underfed, and with weak,
dispirited eyes and yellow tousled hair; others, round-faced, round-eyed,
dark, and sturdy; most of them large-waisted and round-shouldered -- especially
the older ones -- from work in the fields; but, now and then, one like Melissa,
the daughter of a valley farmer, erect, agile, spirited, intelligent. On the
other side were the boys, in physical characteristics the same and suggesting
the same social divisions: at the top the farmer -- now and then a slave-holder
and perhaps of gentle blood -- who had dropped by the way on the westward march
of civilization and had cleared some rich river bottom and a neighboring
summit of the mountains, where he sent his sheep and cattle to graze; where a
creek opened into this valley some free-settler, whose grandfather had fought
at King's Mountain--usually of Scotch-Irish descent, often English, but
sometimes German or sometimes even Huguenot--would have his rude home of logs;
under him, and in wretched cabins at the head of the creek or on the washed
spur of the mountain above, or in some "deadenin"' still higher up and swept
by mists and low-trailing clouds, the poor white trash--worthless descendants
of the servile and sometimes criminal class who might have traced their origin