her school-house, to which some mean hand had applied the torch a month ago, and were lifted up to the mountain-side, where mountain men were chopping down trees and mountain oxen yanking them down the steep slopes to the bank of the creek, and then the peace of them went deeper still, for they could look back on her work and find it good.  Nun-like in renunciation, she had given up her beloved Blue-grass land, she had left home and kindred, and she had settled, two days’ journey from a railroad, in the hills.  She had gone back to the physical life of the pioneers, she had encountered the customs and sentiments of mediaeval days, and no abbess of those days, carrying light into dark places, needed more courage and devotion to meet the hardships, sacrifice, and prejudice that she had overcome.  She brought in the first wagon-load of window-panes for darkened homes before she even tapped on the window of a darkened mind; but when she did, no plants ever turned more eagerly toward the light than did the youthful souls of those Kentucky hills.  She started with five pupils in a log cabin.  She built a homely frame house with five rooms, only to find more candidates clamoring at her door.  She taught the girls to cook, sew, wash and iron, clean house, and make baskets, and the boys to use tools, to farm, make garden, and take care of animals; and she taught them all to keep clean.  Out in the hills she found good old names, English and Scotch-Irish.  She found men who “made their mark” boasting of grandfathers who were “scholards.”  In one household she came upon a time-worn set of the “British Poets” up to the nineteenth century, and such was the sturdy character of the hillsmen that she tossed the theory aside that they were the descendants of the riffraff of the Old World, tossed it as a miserable slander and looked upon them as the same blood as the people of the Blue-grass, the valleys, and the plains beyond.  On the westward march they had simply dropped behind, and their isolation had left them in a long sleep that had given them a long rest, but had done them no real harm.  Always in their eyes, however, she was a woman, and no woman was “fitten” to teach school.  She was more—­a “fotched-on” woman, a distrusted “furriner,” and she was carrying on a “slavery school.”  Sometimes she despaired of ever winning their unreserved confidence, but out of the very depth of that despair to which the firebrand of some miscreant had plunged her, rose her star of hope, for then the Indian-like stoicism of her neighbors melted and she learned the place in their hearts that was really hers.  Other neighborhoods asked for her to come to them, but her own would not let her go.  Straightway there was nothing to eat, smoke, chew, nor wear that grew or was made in those hills that did not pour toward her.  Land was given her, even money was contributed for rebuilding, and when money was not possible, this man and that gave his axe, his horse, his wagon, and his services as a laborer for thirty and sixty days.  So that those axes gleaming in the sun on the hillside, those straining muscles, and those sweating brows meant a labor of love going on for her.  No wonder the peace of her eyes was deep.