self.

The ideas and beliefs for which his early life had stood were already
buried, and now he lay himself at rest, a link between present and
past--as much an exemplification of chivalry as though his feet had been
crossed and his sword laid in the crusader's posture of repose.

Boone heard the austere beauty of the service--but he felt more
poignantly the picture that his eyes looked on: the coffin draped with
two flags that overlapped their folds--though once a tide of
cannon-smother ran between them--the Stars and Stripes of the Nation and
the Stars and Bars of the Confederacy.

On one hand, in a grizzled honour-guard, stood old men in the same mist
grey that he had worn with a general's stars until Lee surrendered, and
on the other hand was ranged an equally frosted and withered squad in
Grand Army blue. Then at last a clear and flawless sweetness floated
away from the lips of the militia bugler, who, in accordance with the
General's wish, was sounding taps across his closing grave.

Something rose in Boone Wellver's throat, and a strange idea stole, not
facetiously but with reverent sincerity, into his thoughts. He wished it
might have been possible for him to stand there as the clods fell, not
as he stood now in the dress of a gentleman, but in homespun and
butternut, clasping in his tight hands the coon-skin cap that his
boyhood had known. For in this gathering, that was like a quiet pageant
of passing eras, he stood for an elder thing than any other here. He
was, in effect, by birth and by beginning, the ancestor of them all, for
he had been born a pioneer!

* * * * *

The school, which had become a home to Happy Spradling, had grown
marvellously since that day when the old mountaineer wrote with his
donation of rocky acres: "I have heart and cravin' that our young people
may grow better, and I deed my land to a school as long as the
Constitution of the United States stands."

It was a precarious undertaking with no endowment except its spirit, but
it is not recorded that Elijah went hungry when his commissary was in
the keeping of ravens--for back of the ravens was the Promise.

From year to year, dependent upon the generosity of those whom its
accomplishments convinced, the school not only existed but grew, and in
order that the springs which fed it might not run dry there were,
several times each year, the "begging trips" of the women who "went
out."

For that was t