“Take good keer of ’Lissy,” said the mother from the porch, kindly; and Chad, curiously touched all at once by the trust shown him, stalked ahead like a little savage, while Melissa with her basket followed silently behind.  The boy never thought of taking the basket himself:  that is not the way of men with women in the hills and not once did he look around or speak on the way up the river and past the blacksmith’s shop and the grist-mill just beyond the mouth of Kingdom Come; but when they arrived at the log school-house it was his turn to be shy and he hung back to let Melissa go in first.  Within, there was no floor but the bare earth, no window but the cracks between the logs, and no desks but the flat sides of slabs, held up by wobbling pegs.  On one side were girls in linsey and homespun:  some thin, undersized, underfed, and with weak, dispirited eyes and yellow tousled hair; others, round-faced, round-eyed, dark, and sturdy; most of them large-waisted and round-shouldered —­ especially the older ones —­ from work in the fields; but, now and then, one like Melissa, the daughter of a valley farmer, erect, agile, spirited, intelligent.  On the other side were the boys, in physical characteristics the same and suggesting the same social divisions:  at the top the farmer —­ now and then a slave-holder and perhaps of gentle blood —­ who had dropped by the way on the westward march of civilization and had cleared some rich river bottom and a neighboring summit of the mountains, where he sent his sheep and cattle to graze; where a creek opened into this valley some free-settler, whose grandfather had fought at King’s Mountain—­usually of Scotch-Irish descent, often English, but sometimes German or sometimes even Huguenot—­would have his rude home of logs; under him, and in wretched cabins at the head of the creek or on the washed spur of the mountain above, or in some “deadenin"’ still higher up and swept by mists and low-trailing clouds, the poor white trash—­worthless descendants of the servile and sometimes criminal class who might have traced their origin back to the slums of London; hand-to-mouth tenants of the valley-aristocrat, hewers of wood for him in the lowlands and upland guardians of his cattle and sheep.  And finally, walking up and down the earth floor—­stern and smooth of face and of a preternatural dignity hardly to be found elsewhere—­the mountain school-master.

It was a “blab school,” as the mountaineers characterize a school in which the pupils study aloud, and the droning chorus as shrill as locust cries ceased suddenly when Chad came in, and every eye was turned on him with a sexless gaze of curiosity that made his face redden and his heart throb.  But he forgot them when the school-master pierced him with eyes that seemed to shoot from under his heavy brows like a strong light from deep darkness.  Chad met them, nor did his chin droop, and Caleb Hazel saw that the boy’s face was frank and honest, and that his