On September 5, the brightest moonlight night, it seemed to me, that the world had ever known, the moonlight schools opened for their first session. We had estimated the number that would attend, and an average of three to each school, one hundred and fifty in the entire county was the maximum set. We waited with anxious hearts. The teachers had volunteered, the schools had been opened, the people had been invited but would they come? They had all the excuses that any toil-worn people ever had. They had rugged roads to travel, streams without bridges to cross, high hills to climb, children to lead and babes to carry, weariness from the hard day’s toil; but they were not seeking excuses, they were seeking knowledge, and so they came. They came singly or hurrying in groups, they came walking for miles, they came carrying babes in arms, they came bent with age and leaning on canes, they came twelve hundred strong! [Illustration: They came carrying babes in arms.] There were overgrown boys who had dropped out of school at an early age and had been ashamed to re-enter the day school and be classified with the tiny tots. These came to catch up again. There were maidens who had been deprived of education, through isolation, invalidism or some other cause, but who felt that there was something better for them in life than ignorance. There were women who had married in childhood, practically, as is so much the wont of mountain girls--but who all their lives had craved that which they knew to be their inherent right--their mental development. By their sides were their husbands, men who had been humiliated when they had made their mark in the presence of the educated and when forced to ask the election officers to cast a vote for them for the candidates of their choice. There were middle-aged men who had seen a hundred golden opportunities pass them by because of the handicap of illiteracy, whose mineral, timber and material stores, as well as their time and labor, were in the control of the educated men, making them but beggars, as it were, on the bounty of those whom they enriched. There were women whose children had all grown up and vanished from the home, some of them into the far West, and when the spoken word and the hand-clasp had ceased there could be no heart-to-heart communication, for the third person as an interpreter between mother and child is but a poor medium at best. These and other folk--some half educated and some more--made up these schools. “Just to learn to read my Bible!” was the cry of many a patriarch and many a withered dame. “Just to write my children with my own hand, and to read their letters with my own eyes!” was the cry of the mother’s heart. “Just to escape from the shame of making my mark!” was the appeal of the middle-aged man. “Just to have a chance with the other folk--to be something and to do something in the world!” was the expressed desire of youth and maid.