month ago, and were lifted up to the mountain-side, where mountain
men were chopping down trees and mountain oxen yanking them down
the steep slopes to the bank of the creek, and then the peace of
them went deeper still, for they could look back on her work and
find it good. Nun-like in renunciation, she had given up her
beloved Blue-grass land, she had left home and kindred, and she
had settled, two days' journey from a railroad, in the hills. She
had gone back to the physical life of the pioneers, she had
encountered the customs and sentiments of mediaeval days, and no
abbess of those days, carrying light into dark places, needed more
courage and devotion to meet the hardships, sacrifice, and
prejudice that she had overcome. She brought in the first wagon-
load of window-panes for darkened homes before she even tapped on
the window of a darkened mind; but when she did, no plants ever
turned more eagerly toward the light than did the youthful souls
of those Kentucky hills. She started with five pupils in a log
cabin. She built a homely frame house with five rooms, only to
find more candidates clamoring at her door. She taught the girls
to cook, sew, wash and iron, clean house, and make baskets, and
the boys to use tools, to farm, make garden, and take care of
animals; and she taught them all to keep clean. Out in the hills
she found good old names, English and Scotch-Irish. She found men
who "made their mark" boasting of grandfathers who were
"scholards." In one household she came upon a time-worn set of the
"British Poets" up to the nineteenth century, and such was the
sturdy character of the hillsmen that she tossed the theory aside
that they were the descendants of the riffraff of the Old World,
tossed it as a miserable slander and looked upon them as the same
blood as the people of the Blue-grass, the valleys, and the plains
beyond. On the westward march they had simply dropped behind, and