a change of linen, brought merely
the necessity of cleanliness without the luxury of adornment. Then there
was a Methodist Church, and hard by a Monte Bank, and a little beyond,
on the mountainside, a graveyard; and then a little schoolhouse.

"The Master," as he was known to his little flock, sat alone one night
in the schoolhouse, with some open copybooks before him, carefully
making those bold and full characters which are supposed to combine the
extremes of chirographical and moral excellence, and had got as far as
"Riches are deceitful," and was elaborating the noun with an insincerity
of flourish that was quite in the spirit of his text, when he heard a
gentle tapping. The woodpeckers had been busy about the roof during
the day, and the noise did not disturb his work. But the opening of the
door, and the tapping continuing from the inside, caused him to look
up. He was slightly startled by the figure of a young girl, dirty
and shabbily clad. Still, her great black eyes, her coarse, uncombed,
lusterless black hair falling over her sunburned face, her red arms
and feet streaked with the red soil, were all familiar to him. It was
Melissa Smith--Smith's motherless child.

"What can she want here?" thought the master. Everybody knew "Mliss,"
as she was called, throughout the length and height of Red Mountain.
Everybody knew her as an incorrigible girl. Her fierce, ungovernable
disposition, her mad freaks and lawless character, were in their way
as proverbial as the story of her father's weaknesses, and as
philosophically accepted by the townsfolk. She wrangled with and fought
the schoolboys with keener invective and quite as powerful arm. She
followed the trails with a woodman's craft, and the master had met
her before, miles away, shoeless, stockingless, and bareheaded on the
mountain road. The miners' camps along the stream supplied her with
subsistence during these voluntary pilgrimages, in freely offered alms.
Not but that a larger protection had been previously extended to Mliss.
The Rev. Joshua McSnagley, "stated" preacher, had placed her in the
hotel as servant, by way of preliminary refinement, and had introduced
her to his scholars at Sunday school. But she threw plates occasionally
at the landlord, and quickly retorted to the cheap witticisms of the
guests, and created in the Sabbath school a sensation that was so
inimical to the orthodox dullness and placidity of that institution
that, with a decent regard