“Just to write my children with my own hand, and to read their letters with my own eyes!” was the cry of the mother’s heart.
“Just to escape from the shame of making my mark!” was the appeal of the middle-aged man.
“Just to have a chance with the other folk—to be something and to do something in the world!” was the expressed desire of youth and maid.
Young men and women whose chance had come.
The youngest student was aged eighteen, the oldest eighty-six. It was a scene to bring tears to the eyes, but surely one to make the heart rejoice, to see those hoary-headed old people and those robust young people seated at their desks studying together, or standing in a row in class to spell, or lined up at the blackboard to solve problems or to write.
Many of them learned to write their names the first evening, and such rejoicing as there was over this event! One old man on the shady side of fifty shouted for joy when he learned to write his name. “Glory to God!” he shouted, “I’ll never have to make my mark any more!”
Some were so intoxicated with joy that they wrote their names in frenzied delight on trees, fences, barns, barrel staves and every available scrap of paper; and those who possessed even meager savings, drew the money out of its hiding place and deposited it in the bank, wrote their checks and signed their names with pride. Soon letters began to go from hands that had never written, before, to loved ones in other counties and in far distant states, and usually the first letter of each student came to the County School Superintendent. In a movement full of romance and heroism, there is no incident more romantic or more delightful to record than the fact that the first three letters that ever came out of the moonlight schools came in this order: the first, from a mother who had children absent in the West; the second, from the man who “would give twenty years of his life if he could read and write”; and the third from the boy who would forget his ballads “before anybody come along to set ’em down.” This answered the anxious question in our hearts as to whether the moonlight schools had met the need of those who had made the appeal.