The Mountain School-Teacher

by Melville Davisson Post

The whole school had often gone into counsel on these cases, ways and means devised, a proper motive constructed, and the child strengthened and drilled. When the device succeeded, the whole school for that day rejoiced, when it failed, the school was depressed, but it was not defeated, and some other plan was brought forward. Some of the plans were exceedingly ingenious, and, as a rule, the school prevailed.

However, when the whole store was finally collected, or as much as could be had, the children were confronted with a staggering disappointment; the entire fund, for all the counting and recounting of it, could not be made to exceed sixty-four cents. A wholesale borrowing, right and left, had added only eleven cents. Now, 't was well-known that a hat could not be purchased for less than a dollar, and when it became evident that the fund must fail by a fourth of that sum the children were in despair.

For a day or two almost the whole school was in tears.

Then, individually, it resorted to desperate devices. One whose grandfather had been accustomed to present him with ten cents on Christmas day endeavored to secure an advancement. A small child had hailed the doctor as he passed along the road, and had offered to work for him all the remainder of his life for ten cents paid down in cash. Another had approached the minister, after the Sunday collection, and endeavored to borrow a twenty-five-cent piece out of the hat.

These ventures had failed, and the latter with the perilous result that the minister had all but extracted the secret for the money, and his withering commentaries on a teacher who inculcated the spirit of avarice into little children had so stricken the child with terror that it had been afraid to tell the school what it had done.

This brief lapse into madness, the practical leadership of Martha, the miller's little girl, and the small boy, David, was presently able to cheek. They pointed out what it was useless to do. But for the present they were not able to bring forward any plan that it seemed worth while to undertake. At this season the only natural product of the mountain that could be exchanged for money was hickory nuts, and the value of this product was in doubt. Sometimes, early in certain seasons, the storekeeper had been known to give twenty-five cents for a bushel of choice hickory nuts, not the gross shellbark nut, but the small, round, sweet-kerneled nut of the smooth-bark hickory.

The school had considered this, but had come always against two serious difficulties. To secure a bushel of these small nuts would require a considerable searching of the mountains, and, despite the fact that the children were very small, each had duties at home that occupied Saturdays, and the evening fragments of the day. On Sundays, an austere theology imposed by the minister compelled them to attend the Sunday sermon and to practice the most rigorous inactivity under pain of hideous consequences. The insurmountable difficulty, however, lay in the fact that they could not get a bushel of hickory nuts over the long distance to the country store.

An unexpected event suddenly removed this difficulty. Coming breathlessly to the school on a Friday morning, little David announced that his father was going to the country store on Tuesday with the wagon to bring home a barrel of salt, and that he had obtained permission to accompany him. At once the school took up the possibility of securing the bushel of hickory nuts. It was immediately evident that within so brief a time the thing could not be done unless the whole of Sunday were devoted to the labor of it. The school promptly decided.

This expedition did not arise from any failure to appreciate the perils of the decision. Corporal chastisement under the home roof was certain to follow; and the hideous tortures vividly presented by the minister, awaiting at the threshold of his future life, that one who broke the Sabbath day, was scarcely less certain. Nevertheless, not a child of the whole school hesitated.

The complete success of the venture strengthened the school to bear the immediate consequences.