impression of distinction. The
two of them, thought the mountain girl, had a bond of sympathy in that
they were each set quite apart from all these others unified by the
stamp of affluence.

Miss Shorte was talking now; telling the story of the school and its
work; flashing before her hearers as if her words were pictures imbued
with colour and form, the patriarchal conditions with which this work
was surrounded. Laughter interrupted her lighter recitals, and when she
spoke of graver phases there was that light clearing of throats that
carries from an audience to a stage the proclamation of stirred emotion,
and of tears not far from the surface.

The speaker gave a few illustrations of the sort of manhood and
womanhood that is sometimes wrought out of that crude ore when the
tempering of help and education is available to refine it.

Lincoln had sprung from such stock. Even now the member in Congress from
that district was a man born in a log shack of illiterate parents. He
had fought feudal animosities and gone upward by a rugged ascent. Now
he was recognized by his colleagues as a man of ability and breadth. So
far had he outgrown the strictures of provincialism, that he was a
member of the Foreign Relations Committee. But better than that his own
people swore by him because they knew "their lives and deaths were his
to him"--because in a land where men had been afraid to serve on juries
and to enforce the law, they were no longer afraid.

The school sought to develop other Boone Wellvers from the same
beginnings ... to help others toward a similar fulfilment.

The musical critic heard a faint gasping breath from the chair at his
side. He turned quickly and was startled by the pale, emotion-drawn face
of the young woman who sat there without escort. For an instant he
thought that some poor creature actually pinched by want had crept in,
attracted by the light and warmth for a brief interval of rest, then he
looked with a more piercing appraisement at the features and discarded
that idea.

"Are you ill?" he demanded in a low voice. "Can I serve you?"

The young woman shook her head and forced a smile whose graciousness
must have come less from conscious effort than from life habit.

"No, thank you," she answered in a low voice that had meaning to one who
knew music wherever he found it. "It was nothing ... I came late ... who
is the girl who sang?"

"She was introduced as Miss Happy Spradling," said the crit