“Where do you live?”

“Down the road a piece—­’bout a whoop an’ a holler.”

“What?  Oh, I see.”

He smiled, for she meant to measure distance by sound, and she had used merely a variation of the “far cry” of Elizabethan days.

“Your father works in tobacco?” She nodded.

“You come from near the Ohio River?”

She looked puzzled.

“I come from the mountains.”

“Oh!”

He understood now her dress and speech, and he was not surprised at the answer to his next question.

“I hain’t nuver been to school.  Pap couldn’t spare me.”

“Can you read and write?”

“No,” she said, but she flushed, and he knew straightway the sensitiveness and pride with which he would have to deal.

“Well,” he said kindly, “we will begin now.”

And he took the alphabet and told her the names of several letters and had her try to make them with a lead pencil, which she did with such uncanny seriousness and quickness that the pity of it, that in his own State such intelligence should be going to such broadcast waste for the want of such elemental opportunities, struck him deeply.  The general movement to save that waste was only just beginning, and in that movement he meant to play his part.  He was glad now to have under his own supervision one of those mountaineers of whom, but for one summer, he had known so little and heard so much—­chiefly to their discredit—­and he determined then and there to do all he could for her.  So he took her back to her seat with a copy-book and pencil and told her to go on with her work, and that he would go to see her father and mother as soon as possible.

“I hain’t got no mammy—­hit’s a step-mammy,” she said, and she spoke of the woman as of a horse or a cow, and again he smiled.  Then as he turned away he repeated her name to himself and with a sudden wonder turned quickly back.

“I used to know some Hawns down in your mountains.  A little fellow named Jason Hawn used to go around with me all the time.”

Her eyes filled and then flashed happily.

“Why, mebbe you air the rock-pecker?”

“The what?”

“The jologist.  Jason’s my cousin.  I wasn’t thar that summer.  Jason’s always talkin’ ’bout you.”

“Well, well—­I guess I am.  That is curious.”

“Jason’s mammy was a Honeycutt an’ she married my daddy an’ they run away,” she went on eagerly, “an’ I had to foller ’em.”

“Where’s Jason?” Again her eyes filled.

“I don’t know.”

John Burnham put his hand on her head gently and turned to his desk.  He rang the bell and when the pupils trooped back she was hard at work, and she felt proud when she observed several girls looking back to see what she was doing, and again she was mystified that each face showed the same expression of wonder and of something else that curiously displeased her, and she wondered afresh why it was that everything in that strange land held always something that she could never understand.  But a disdainful whisper came back to her that explained it all.