It was to mountain people that George Washington looked for hope and help in the hour of our country's need, and two later presidents held the same opinion. The mother and the wife of a president of these United States have done likewise. One winter day more than a score of years ago a group of children huddled about the pot-bellied stove in a little log church in the mountains of Georgia. They had trudged through snow and mud and a cold, biting wind to reach this one-room church house. Though the older folk were eager to teach the children lessons of Scripture, few of them could read or write. A mountain child, like every other child, delights in hearing an older person read, whether it be a make-believe story or a real story from the Bible. "Wisht you could read the Word," an eager little girl this winter day said to the old woman who, though she could neither read nor write, was doing her best to explain from a small colored leaflet the meaning of the Sunday School lesson. The story reached the ears of a lady not far away. After that she began reading Bible stories to the mountain children gathered at a little log cabin near her home. "Martha Berry didn't need eye specs to see how eager the children were for learning," one of her mountain friends remarked, "and then and there she began to ruminate through her mind a way to help them help themselves. 'Not to be ministered unto, but to minister,' that was what Martha Berry said from the very first and that is still the motto of the great institution that has steadily grown up from the humble beginning in a little one-room log house." It is an unusual institution of learning with a campus equally unique, for in its 25,000 acres are a forest, a mountain, and a lake and more than one hundred buildings which were not only erected by Berry students, but built from materials also made by them. Here mountain boys and girls express the fine spirit of independence inherited from their forbears. Once they enter the Gate of Opportunity, they _earn_ their education. The mountain boy, with his carpentry, brick-making, stock-raising, hand-carving, matches his skill in friendly rivalry with the girl, in her spinning and weaving, making dyes and canning fruits. In one year the girls canned 50,000 gallons of fruit grown within the boundary of the Berry Schools. Boys and girls of the Georgia mountains need not despair nor be backward while the "Sunday Lady of Possum Trot" keeps open the Gate of Opportunity to the Berry Schools.