Racked muscles, black-and-blue spots, and dislocated bones are not exactly pleasant; but physical pain is an actual relief after endless ache of heart and suffering of spirit.
A pretty, brown-eyed boy just brought in a pitcher of water, asked me if I came from the "level country" and how many times I had "rid" on the railroad train; and gave me the information that he was Philip Sidney Floyd, that his "paw" got his name out of a book, that his "maw" was dead, that he was "very nigh thirteen," and had worked for "the women" all summer.
II
GETTING ACQUAINTED
Monday Night.
Early this morning I was taken around by Philip and a smaller boy named Geordie to see the buildings,—handsome ones of logs, set in a narrow strip of bottom land along Perilous Creek. The "big house" especially, a great log structure of two-dozen rooms, where the settlement work goes on, and the teachers and girls live, is the most satisfying building I ever saw. There are also a good workshop, a pretty loom-house, and a small hospital, and the last shingles are being nailed on the large new school-house. When I asked the boys why any school-term should begin the first of August, they explained that the children must go home and help their parents hoe corn during May, June and July.
All day the children who are to live in the school, and many more who hope to, were arriving, afoot or on nags, the boys, however small, in long trousers and black felt hats like their fathers, the girls a little more cheerfully dressed than their mothers, whose black sun-bonnets and somber homespun dresses were depressing. Many of the parents stayed to dinner. There is a fine, old-fashioned dignity in their manners, and great gentleness in their voices. I have always heard that, shut away here in these mountains, some of the purest and best Anglo-Saxon blood in the nation is to be found; now I am sure of it. It was pathetic to see the eagerness of these men and women that their children should get learning, and to hear many of them tell how they themselves had had no chance whatever at an education, being raised probably sixty or eighty miles from a school-house.
Late in the afternoon, as Philip, Geordie and I were fastening up straying rose-vines on the pine-tree pillars of the "big house" porch, a one-legged and very feeble man, accompanied by a boy, dismounted at the gate and came up the walk on a crutch. During the time he sat on the porch, my two assistants abandoned their work to stare open-mouthed at him. When he was called in to see the heads, Geordie inquired of his boy,
"How'd your paw git all lamed up thataway?"