But different words sprang from the lips of Ephraim and Priscilla.
Ephraim, the boy who a few years before had discovered Wind Cave, now grown to a good sized youth, said: "You are wrong, ma. Most of us around here are a low down set without books or religion. If these ladies are willin' to spend their time to come all this way and teach us larnin' and de Bible, I say we ought to thank them, and help them to start de school."
Priscilla said she agreed with her brother and thought it was time they "were gittin' out of their pore way of livin'," and she would be glad "to jine de school" if her mother would let her.
Mrs. Wiles gave a cold consent, and the carriage drove away, the ladies thankful that they had secured at least two more advocates of their scheme.
Mose spoke to his mettled steeds and soon they were drawing the carriage over an unfrequented road through a deep forest to the cabin of Harrop Sneath. He and his house were typical of the poorest of the "poor whites." His cabin consisted of one room, about fourteen feet square, with one door and no windows. It was made of unhewn logs plastered with clay. The only daylight which entered the cabin came through the door when open and down the chimney. On the inside stood a bedstead made of poles stuck between the logs of the angle, the outside corner supported by a crotched stick. The table was a huge hewn log, standing on four pegs. A log bench or two took the place of chairs. The cooking utensils consisted of an iron pot, which hung in the big chimney, a kettle and skillet and a few pewter and tin dishes. The loft was the sleeping place of most of the children. It was reached by a ladder of wooden pins driven into the logs.
Harrop Sneath was too lazy and shiftless to work much. He cultivated in a careless way a small piece of cleared ground around his cabin on which he raised a little Indian corn. The meat for his family was provided by his rifle, for the woods abounded in game—deer, wild turkeys, etc.
It was in such a cabin that Abraham Lincoln was born in another part of Kentucky about this time.
When Viola and Henrietta entered the clearing Sneath was sitting in the sun on a log bench in front of his cabin. He was a man in middle life and like most of the hillside settlers was the father of several children.
The young ladies addressed him pleasantly, and asked after his family and his crops.
He replied, that "de old woman and de kids war right peart; that de crops were most a dead failure because of de dry spell." He "'lowed a dry spell war mighty bad for crops on hillside farms." In this he was quite right.