The Mountain School-Teacher

by Melville Davisson Post

There was a smell of faint wood smoke.

The door of the house was fastened with a wooden latch on the inside from which a black leather string, tied in a knot, issuing from a worn hole, hung on the outside of the door. The man drew the door close and, pulling the string, dropped the latch into place. Then he left the house, walking slowly.

In the direction that he moved there was no path. He crossed the little meadow, south of the house, climbed the rail fence and entered the forest. There was still no path, although the man moved like one who followed land marks that he knew.

He descended through the forest for perhaps half a mile in the deep leaves.

Then he came abruptly on a path that entered a little cove and continued around a shoulder of the mountain. A spring of water issuing here from a limestone strata trickled into a keg buried in the earth. On the broken branch of a dogwood sapling, beside the spring, hung a mottled gourd.

The School-teacher stopped, dipped the gourd into the crystal water, and drank.

At this moment three figures came into view along the path from the opposite direction: a child about two years old, a woman, and a rough-haired yellow dog.

The child came first. He walked with the uncertain tottering gait of very little children. He wore a clean, white, muslin dress, a tiny apron and cheap baby shoes, such as one sees hanging on a string over the counter of mountain stores. He was a sturdy little boy, with soft yellow hair, burnished at the tips like that of the School-teacher, and big gray-blue eyes. He was laughing, stopping now and then to look back at the dog following, and his mother; and then running along ahead.

The woman was young and slender. Her face, tanned by the weather, was a deep olive. Her hair was black, lustrous and heavy, and hung down her back in a thick plait. Her eyes were dark and big. The whole aspect of the woman was that of one untimely matured, and permanently saddened. Her blue dress was of a cheaper material than that of the child's.

She carried a tin bucket with a wooden handle.