"Nearest school is twenty mile acrost, over on Turkey Creek," she said briefly. "Oncet there was a nearer one, but teacher was a Hatfield, and McCoys got him, of course. This was McCoy kentry 'fore they all got so killed off. He ought to 'a' knowed better than come over here to teach." This casual reference to a famous feud--news of whose infamy had spread far, far beyond the mountains which had hatched it--from the lips of one so young and lovely (for he had long ago admitted to himself that as she stood there she was lovelier than any being he had ever seen before) appalled Frank Layson, son of level regions, graduate of Harvard, casual sportsman, amateur mountaineer, who had come to look over his patrimony and the country round about. "Ah--yes," said he, and frowned. And then: "It leaves you in hard luck, though, doesn't it, if you want to learn and can't," said he. "It sartin does, for--oh, I _do_ hanker powerful to learn!" "May I stay here by the fire with you a while and get warm, too," he asked. (The unaccustomed exercise of tramping through the mountains had kept him in a fever heat all day.) "An' welcome," she said cordially, moving aside a bit, so that he could approach without the circumnavigation of a mighty stump. He could not tell whether or not she had made note of many sweat-beads on his brow and wondered at them on a chilly man. "Perhaps," said he, "I might, in a few minutes, show you a little about what you want to know. I've been lucky. I have had a chance to learn." She liked the way he said it. There was no hint of superiority about it. He was not "stuck up," in his claim of knowledge. He "had had a chance," and took no credit to himself for it. This pleased her, won her confidence--if, already, that had not been done by his frank face, in spite of his fancy clothes and her assumption that he was a namby-pamby weakling. "Oh--if you would!" she said, so eagerly that it seemed to him most pitiful. So, five minutes later, when all her clothing save her heavy outer skirt, had been quite dried there by the fire, and that same fire's abounding warmth had sent his temperature up to high discomfort mark, they sat down, side by side, upon a log, the spelling-book between them, and he began the pleasant task of teaching her her A, B, Cs. "'A,'" said he, "is this one at the very start." "The peaked one," said she. "Yes, that one. "And 'B,'" he went on, much amused, but with a perfectly grave face, "is this one with two loops fastened, so, to a straight stalk." "I know where thar _is_ a bee-tree," she remarked, irrelevantly. "It will help recall this in your mind," said he, maintaining perfect gravity, "imagine it with two big loops of rope fastened to one side of it--" "Rope wouldn't stick out that-a-way," said she, "it would just droop. They'd have to be of somethin' stiffen" "Well--" said he, and tried to think of something.