upon the sterile mountain sides and in the richer valleys, saying
No! to the pressing outside world, with its progress and its
change.

Many winters and summers passed over the settlement of J----, on
---- creek, forty miles from all railroads, shut in by laurel-covered
hills and pine mountains; its people, of fine pioneer ancestry and
deeply religious, thrown back upon themselves through segregation
and isolation, had lost much of the initiative and force that
characterized their ancestors, and had crystallized along the
lines of their peculiarities, as any people will under the same
conditions.

Up the creek and into the valley one day there came two "foreign"
women from the great world beyond. They were Home Missionaries,
but did not use this designation for fear the mountain people
might not understand that they came simply as friends to bring
to the valley the _opportunity_ America gives to her children.

They found the people simple folk, ignorant, but with no touch of
vulgarity. Their eyes saw no opening beyond the blue shadows of
the enveloping mountains. To a few the longing to _know_, or that
their children might have a "_chance_," hung like a star afar off,
but with little hope of attainment.

A dark fatalism presided over their destinies. "What is to be will
be, I reckon," summed up their philosophy.

About many of them appeared an atmosphere of the unconscious moral
heroism that willingly gives its all to meet whatever the day may