“No matter how queer he was dressed, or what queer things he did,” she told herself, “he sure was mountain-born.  This here’s a mountain fireplace, sartin sure.”

She broke dead branches from a pine-top, not far away, but still far enough so that, with reasonable watching, it would not be endangered by a fire built on this spot (the old man plainly had considered this when he made the fire, for the place was almost the only one in all the clearing free enough from dry pine branches to make fire building safe) and laid them on the coals which he had buried, but which she now had carefully uncovered.  She would, she had decided, dry her clothes before she started on the long, cool, woods-road climb up to her cabin.

Kneeling by the coals and blowing on them, skillfully adjusting splinters so that they would catch the draft, she soon had started a small flame.  Fed carefully, this grew rapidly.  Within five minutes there was burning on the site of the old man’s little cooking-fire a cheerful blaze of size.  Its rushing warmth was very grateful to her, and she held her hands out to it, then her feet, one after the other, with skirts lifted daintily, so that her chilled limbs might catch the warmth.

Invigorated by the pleasant heat, she once more yielded to the urgings of the bounding spirit of rich youth within her.  Even as she had sported in the water ere the interloper came to interrupt her sylvan bath, now she sported there about the fire in an impromptu dance, never for a second uncouth, despite the fact that she was quite untrained; scarcely less graceful than her merrymaking in the water, although then she had not been, as now, hampered in her grace of movement by the unlovely draperies of homespun linsey-woolsey.  As she had been a water-nymph, so, now, she might have been some Druid maid dancing by an altar fire.  The roughness of the ground did not annoy her—­her feet had not known dancing upon polished waxen wood; the lack of spectators did not deter her—­those whom she had learned to know and love, the mountains, trees, the squirrels, and birds, were there.

In the very midst of the abandon of this rustic symphony of movement, the thought came to her that the precious spelling-book was lying on the rock, near by, quite soaked, neglected.  She sped to it and took it to the fire’s edge, where, opening its pages one by one, so that each would get the warmth, she held it as close as she opined was safe.  Having dried it until she no longer feared the wetting it had had would seriously harm its usefulness (the lovely smoothness of its magic leaves was gone, alas! beyond recall) she paused there for a moment, herself still far from dry, with a bare foot held out to the blaze, and studied curiously one of the book’s pages.

Thereon the letters of the alphabet, large, ominous, suggestive to her mind of nothing in the world but curlycues, loomed, mystifying.  For the first time it occurred to her that in securing the small volume she had not, as she had thought to do, solved the problem of an education.  The characters, she saw to her dismay, meant nothing to her.  In the absence of a teacher she could not learn from them!