Early Monday morning, while the frost yet glistened on grass and hedge row, Abner, accompanied by Susan, Tommy and the twins, set out for the schoolhouse, a mile distant. At the same time, by a dozen different paths through woods and fields, other children with dinner pails and spelling-books hastened toward the same goal, regardless of nuts, wild grapes and other woodland attractions; for each wanted to be first to reach the schoolhouse on this, the opening day.
Cane Ridge schoolhouse was a large hut of unhewn logs, with a roof of rough boards and bark. The windows were covered with oiled paper instead of glass, and the scanty light thus admitted was augmented by that which came in through frequent gaps in the mud-daubed walls. Wind, rain and snow likewise found free admission through these crevices; but on winter days the climate of the schoolroom was tempered by the blazing logs piled in the mammoth fireplace occupying one entire end of the building.
A rude platform opposite the fireplace was the master's rostrum, whereon was his high, box-like desk of pine and his split-bottomed chair. Just back of his seat upon the floor of the platform stood a row of dinner pails, and above on wooden pegs hung the children's hats and bonnets. On each side of the room was a long writing-desk, merely a rough board resting with the proper slant upon stout pins driven into the walls. Here on rude, backless benches sat the larger boys and girls. At the right-hand side of the room, on a lower bench in front of the older pupils, sat the little boys "with curving backs and swinging feet, and with eyes that beamed all day long with fun or apprehension." Opposite them, on a similar bench, was a row of little girls in linsey dresses and tow-linen pinafores.
Every grade of home was represented—the shiftless renter's squalid hovel, the backwoods hunter's rude hut, the substantial log house of the prosperous farmer, and the more pretentious dwelling of such men as Gilcrest and Dunlap and Winston, who claimed kinship with the flower of Virginian aristocracy.
In the pioneer schools grammar, history, geography, and the sciences, if taught at all, were usually treated orally; but in the main, spelling, reading, writing and arithmetic were the only branches studied. As reading-charts for the little ones, the alphabet was pasted upon broad hickory paddles which were frequently used for outside as well as inside application of knowledge. Readers were coming into vogue, but in most schools the pupils in reading advanced from alphabetical paddle to spelling-book; from spelling-book to "Pilgrim's Progress" or the Bible. Sometimes the Bible was the only reading-book allowed by the parent, and many a child in those days learned to read by wrestling with the jaw-breaking words in Kings and Chronicles; for, as Bushrod Hinkson declared when he refused to buy a reader for his son, "The Bible's 'nough tex'-book on readin', an' when a boy hez learned to knock the pins frum undah all the big words in the 'Good Book,' he'll be able to travel like a streak o' lightnin' through all kinds o' print."
CHAPTER III.
CANE RIDGE MEETING-HOUSE
The third Sunday in October was the regular once-a-month meeting-day at Cane Ridge Church. Early in the morning a note of preparation was sounded throughout the Rogers domain, and by nine o'clock the entire household was en route for the place of worship. On chairs in the wagon drawn by two stout farm horses sat Mr. and Mrs. Rogers and the four youngest children, while young Dudley, Henry and Susan rode horseback. Uncle Tony, by reason of age, and Aunt Dink, by reason of flesh, instead of walking with the other negroes, were allowed to sit on the straw-covered floor of the wagon behind the white occupants.