been discovered.  So eastward once more, with the stampede of the miners, he turned his face.  He was successful at the outset in this new region.  He quickly accumulated a fortune; he lost it and amassed another; lost that and still gained a third.  Five successive fortunes he made successively, and successively he lost them.  But during this time he had become a man of power and influence in the community.  He married and raised a family and saw his children comfortably settled.

But when his last fortune was swept away, the old Wanderlust again claimed its own.  Houses and lands and mortgages and mills and mines had slipped from his grasp.  But it mattered little.  He had only himself to care for, and, with pick and pan strapped to his saddlebow, he set his face westward.  Along the ridges of the high Rockies, through Wyoming and Montana, he wandered, ever on the lookout for the glint of gold in the white quartz.  Little by little he moved westward, picking up a sufficient living, until he found himself one winter shut in by the snows in a remote valley on the upper waters of the Gallatin River.  He stopped one night at a lonely ranch house.  In the course of the evening his host told him of a catastrophe that had befallen the widely scattered inhabitants of that remote valley.  The teacher of the district school had fallen sick, and there was little likelihood of their getting another until spring.

That is a true catastrophe to the ranchers of the high valleys cut off from every line of communication with the outer world.  For the opportunities of education are highly valued in that part of the West.  They are reckoned with bread and horses and cattle and sheep, as among the necessities of life.  The children were crying for school, and their parents could not satisfy that peculiar kind of hunger.  But here was the relief.  This wanderer who had arrived in their midst was a man of parts.  He was lettered; he was educated.  Would he do them the favor of teaching their children until the snow had melted away from the ridges, and his cayuse could pick the trail through the canons?

Now school-keeping was farthest from this man’s thoughts.  But the needs of little children were very near to his heart.  He accepted the offer, and entered the log schoolhouse as the district schoolmaster, while a handful of pupils, numbering all the children of the community who could ride a broncho, came five, ten, and even fifteen miles daily, through the winter’s snows and storms and cruel cold, to pick up the crumbs of learning that had lain so long untouched.

What happened in that lonely little school, far off on the Gallatin bench, I never rightly discovered.  But when spring opened up, the master sold his cayuse and his pick and his rifle and the other implements of his trade.  With the earnings of the winter he made his way to the school that the state had established for the training of teachers; and I count it as one of the privileges of my life that I was the first official of that school to listen to his story and to welcome him to the vocation that he had chosen to follow.