At last it came out that he had not heard from home since he left it.  “Don’t you ever write?” I asked.  “No, I am not an eddicated man, although I started to school.  Yes’m, I started along of the rest, but they told me it was a Yankee teacher and I was ’fraid, so when I got most to the schoolhouse I hid in the bushes with my spelling-book, so that is all the learning I ever got.  But my mother was an eddicated woman, yes’m, she could both read and write.  I have the Bible she give me yit.  Yes’m, you jist wait and I’ll show you.”  After some rummaging in a box he came back with a small leather-bound Bible with print so small it was hard to read.  After turning to the record of births and deaths he handed it to me, his wrinkled old face shining with pride as he said, “There, my mother wrote that with her own hand.”  I took the book and after a little deciphered that “Zebulon Pike Parker was born Feb. 10, 1830,” written in the stiff, difficult style of long ago and written with pokeberry ink.  He said his mother used to read about some “old feller that was jist covered with biles,” so I read Job to him, and he was full of surprise they didn’t “git some cherry bark and some sasparilly and bile it good and gin it to him.”

He had a side room to his cabin, which was his bedroom; so that night he spread down a buffalo robe and two bearskins before the fire for Jerrine and me.  After making sure there were no moths in them, I spread blankets over them and put a sleepy, happy little girl to bed, for he had insisted on making molasses candy for her because they happened to be born on the same day of the month.  And then he played the fiddle until almost one o’clock.  He played all the simple, sweet, old-time pieces, in rather a squeaky, jerky way, I am afraid, but the music suited the time and the place.

Next morning he called me early and when I went out I saw such a beautiful sunrise, well worth the effort of coming to see.  I had thought his cabin in a canon, but the snow had deceived me, for a few steps from the door the mountains seemed to drop down suddenly for several hundred feet and the first of the snow peaks seemed to lie right at our feet.  Around its base is a great swamp, in which the swamp pines grow very thickly and from which a vapor was rising that got about halfway up the snow peak all around.  Fancy to yourself a big jewel-box of dark green velvet lined with silver chiffon, the snow peak lying like an immense opal in its center and over all the amber light of a new day.  That is what it looked most like.

Well, we next went to the corral, where I was surprised to find about thirty head of sheep.  Some of them looked like they should have been sold ten years before.  “Don’t you ever sell any of your sheep?” I asked.  “No’m.  There was a feller come here once and wanted to buy some of my wethers, but I wouldn’t sell any because I didn’t need any money.”  Then he went from animal to animal, caressing each and talking to them, calling them each by name.  He milked his one cow, fed his two little mules, and then we went back to the house to cook breakfast.  We had delicious venison steak, smoking hot, and hoe-cakes and the “bestest” coffee, and honey.