And then the big boys: the hulking Lawrences the lazy Neills, unfathered sons of mother and daughter Hickman, with a stoop in his shoulders and the rest. When her mother could spare her, 'Tildy came,-a midnight beauty, with starry eyes and tapering limbs and her brother, correspondingly homely. 'Thenie was on hand early,-a jolly, ugly, good-hearted girl, who slyly dipped snuff and looked after her little bow-legged brother. Fat Reuben's little chubby girl came, with golden face and old gold hair, faithful and solemn. There were the Burkes, two brown and yellow lads, and tine haughty-eyed girl. There were the Dowells from their farm over toward Alexandria: Fanny, with her smooth black face and wondering eyes Martha, brown and dull the pretty girl wife of a brother, and the younger brood. The longing to know, to be a student in the great school at Nashville, hovered like a star above this child woman amid her work and worry, and she studied doggedly. First came Josie and her brothers and sisters. I trembled when I heard the patter of little feet down the dusty road, and saw the growing row of dark solemn faces and bright eager eyes facing me. It was a hot morning late in July when the school opened. The mother would scold the father for being so "easy " Josie would roundly rate the boys for carelessness and all knew that it was a hard thing to dig a living out of a rocky side hill. I saw much of this family afterward, and grew to love them for their honest efforts to be decent and comfortable, and for their knowledge of their own ignorance. She had about her a certain fineness, the shadow of an unconscious moral heroism that would willingly give all of life to make life broader, deeper and fuller for her and hers. She seemed to be the centre of the family: always busy at service or at home, or berry-picking a little nervous and inclined to scold, like her mother, yet faithful, too, like her father. There remained two growing girls a shy midget of eight John, tall, awkward, and eighteen Jim, younger, quicker, and better looking and two babies of indefinite age. The mother was different,- strong, bustling, and energetic, with a quick, restless tongue, and an ambition to live "like folks." There was a crowd of children. The father was a quiet, simple soul, calmly ignorant, with no touch of vulgarity. It was a dull frame cottage with four rooms, perched just below the brow of the hill, amid peach trees. Next morning I crossed the tall round hill, lingered to look at the blue and yellow mountains stretching toward the Carolinas then I plunged into the wood, and came out at Josie's home.
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