lks in
various cities, by spring raising enough money to start the desired
Settlement School at Hindman.
During a dozen years this remarkable school has grown and prospered,
until more than a hundred children now live in it, and two hundred
more attend day-school.
While its academic work is excellent, special stress is laid upon
the industrial courses, the aim being to fit the children for
successful lives in their own beloved mountains. To this end the
boys are taught agriculture, carpentry, wood and metal work, and the
rudiments of mechanics; the girls cooking, home-nursing, sewing,
laundry work, and weaving, these subjects being learned not only in
classes, but by doing the actual labor of school and farm.
Aside from educational work proper, various forms of social service
are carried on,--district nursing, classes in sanitation and
hygiene, social clubs and entertainments for people of all ages, and
a department of fireside industries, through which is created an
outside market for the beautiful coverlets, blankets and homespun,
woven by the mountain women, as well as for their attractive baskets.
When the children trained in our school go out to teach in the
district schools, they take with them not only what they have
learned in books, but our ideas as to practical living and social
service also, each one becoming a center of influence in a new
neighborhood.
A feature of the work that deserves special mention is the nursing
and hospital department, the ministrations of our trained nurse.
Miss Butler, having done more, possibly, than any other one thing,
not only to spread a knowledge of sanitation and preventive hygiene,
but also to establish confidential and friendly relations with the
people.
The foregoing story, "Sight to the Blind," gives some idea of this
branch of the work, the scope of which has been much extended,
however, during the three years since the story was written for _The
Century Magazine_. In that period the half-dozen clinics held in
the school hospital by Dr. Stucky of Lexington, and his co-workers,
have brought direct surgical and other relief to the afflicted of
four counties. To be present at one of these clinics is to live
Bible days over again, and to see "the lame walk, the deaf hear, the
blind receive their sight, and the poor have the good news preached
to them."
And not only this,--these clinics have demonstrated that nearly
one-half the people examined have trach
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