f and
looked after her little bow-legged brother. When her mother could
spare her, 'Tildy came,--a midnight beauty, with starry eyes and
tapering limbs; and her brother, correspondingly homely. And then the
big boys,--the hulking Lawrences; the lazy Neills, unfathered sons of
mother and daughter; Hickman, with a stoop in his shoulders; and the
rest.

There they sat, nearly thirty of them, on the rough benches, their
faces shading from a pale cream to a deep brown, the little feet bare
and swinging, the eyes full of expectation, with here and there a
twinkle of mischief, and the hands grasping Webster's blue-black
spelling-book. I loved my school, and the fine faith the children had
in the wisdom of their teacher was truly marvellous. We read and
spelled together, wrote a little, picked flowers, sang, and listened to
stories of the world beyond the hill. At times the school would
dwindle away, and I would start out. I would visit Mun Eddings, who
lived in two very dirty rooms, and ask why little Lugene, whose flaming
face seemed ever ablaze with the dark-red hair uncombed, was absent all
last week, or why I missed so often the inimitable rags of Mack and Ed.
Then the father, who worked Colonel Wheeler's farm on shares, would
tell me how the crops needed the boys; and the thin, slovenly mother,
whose face was pretty when washed, assured me that Lugene must mind the
baby. "But we'll start them again next week." When the Lawrences
stopped, I knew that the doubts of the old folks about book-learning
had conquered again, and so, toiling up the hill, and getting as far
into the cabin as possible, I put Cicero "pro Archia Poeta" into the
simplest English with local applications, and usually convinced
them--for a week or so.

On Friday nights I often went home with some of the
children,--sometimes to Doc Burke's farm. He was a great, loud, thin
Black, ever working, and trying to buy the seventy-five acres of hill
and dale where he lived; but people said that he would surely fail, and
the "white folks would get it all." His wife was a magnificent Amazon,
with saffron face and shining hair, uncorseted and barefooted, and the
children were strong and beautiful. They lived in a
one-and-a-half-room cabin in the hollow of the farm, near the spring.
The front room was full of great fat white beds, scrupulously neat; and
there were bad chromos on the walls, and a tired centre-table. In the
tiny back kitchen I was often in