“Oh, do you get a letter every day? How jolly! My mother doesn’t write to me but once a week,” said Lil, “—although of course she ’phones me in the meantime and sends me candy and things.”
“We uns never does git letters from maw,” and poor Tom Tit’s eyes clouded sadly. “Ever since the men came and found her and hid her in that hole she ain’t writ a line to poor Tom Tit.”
“But you write to her every time you write to me, don’t you, Tom Tit?” and the old gentleman put a calming and kindly hand on the shoulder of the trembling youth. It seemed that at every mention of mothers the thought of his own mother came back to him and the agony he went through with at the time of her death seized hold of him. The young people learned later from their host, while Tom Tit was washing the supper dishes, all about the poor boy’s history.
“Tom Tit’s mother was a very fine woman of an intelligence and character that was remarkable even in these mountains where intelligence and character are the rule rather than the exception. She had no education, but the things she could accomplish without education were enough to make the ones who have been educated blush to think how little they do with it. She had evolved a philosophy of her own of such goodness and serenity that to know her and talk with her was a privilege. She seemed to me to be like these mountains, where she was born and where she died. She had had trouble enough to break the spirit of any ordinary mortal, but she said her spirit was eternal and could not be broken.
“Her husband was a very desperate character. Convicted of illicit distilling, he was sentenced to serve a term in the penitentiary, but he managed to escape and for one whole year he evaded the sheriff, hiding in the mountains. Of course his wife had to go through the agony of this long search. She told me she had never slept more than an hour at a time while her husband was in hiding. That was the one thing she was bitter over—that long hounding of her husband. She used to say if the government had spent the money and energy in educating the mountaineers that they had in hunting for them, there would have been no cause for hunting for them. Moonshining is to them a perfectly reasonable and lawful industry, and nothing but education can make them see it differently. His hiding place was finally ferreted out and he was surrounded and captured, but not before he had managed to shoot five men, killing two of them and being fatally wounded himself.
“That was many years ago when Tom Tit was a little chap of three. Melissa, the mother, was wrapped up in the child. His intelligence then was keen and his love of Nature and beautiful things was so pronounced from the beginning that if this cloud had not come over his intellect he would surely have been a great artist of some kind, whether poet, painter or musician, I can’t say.”
“Perhaps all of them, like Leonardo da Vinci!” exclaimed Lil, who always did know things.
The old gentleman smiled at her appreciatively.
“What is an artist but a person who finds things, just like my poor Tom Tit, and then is able to tell to the world what he has found?”
“When he writes to you, does he tell you things in poetical language?” asked Lucy, her gray eyes very teary as she listened to the story of the mountain youth.