She missed the school, and she always kept, close at hand, her thumbed and dog-eared book, the only one that she possessed. The school-teacher had lighted the fires of ambition within her. She came to be troubled by the realization that her mental development was lagging behind her physical growth. “S’liny Jo,” she informed herself one day in a fit of musing, “you air as p’izen strong as a gallon o’ green shinny, but you don’t know skercely nothin’.” A moment later she added dejectedly: “Ner ain’t got no chanchet o’ learnin’, neether; not nary par-tick-le of a chancet!” Shoalwater River afforded her chief means of diversion. She never remembered when or how she learned to swim. Every day that the weather permitted she enjoyed a plunge in the river. Soon she noticed that no less pleasant than the contact of the water with her naked body was the comfortable after-feeling of cleanliness. Following this, came a feeling of repugnance toward her shiftless and slovenly parents. She had long since begun to assist with the crops. With the manure scraped from the cow lot she made the beds for the potatoes. At planting time she pulled the slips and set them out. She hoed the sugar cane and thinned the corn. During harvest she did almost as much work as Shug and Marthy combined. Before she was fourteen she had broken a pair of young steers to the yoke. She split the rails and laid the fence for a new potato patch. Using for the purpose the young oxen which she had broken, she prepared the ground for planting. She was as tall as her father now, a slender, wiry creature, her symmetrical young body as free from blemish as the trunk of a healthy pine tree. A vague unrest troubled her at times, though. Something occurred one day which intensified this. In a corner of the cabin she found a dust-covered photograph. Brushing it off, she gazed upon a face that was unfamiliar. She took the picture to Marthy. “Maw,” she asked, “who is this?” Her mother glanced at it indifferently. “Me,” she answered listlessly. “_You?_” Selina Jo gasped. “Yeah. Ruther, it usetah be. Tuck when I married yore paw.” Selina Jo scanned the comely pictured face for some likeness to the slatternly creature who had given her birth. Wild resentment against something--she scarcely knew what--flamed in her heart. Suddenly she dashed the photograph to the floor and hurried from the cabin. As one reads the chronicle of her words, it must be remembered that her vocabulary was patterned after that of her father. “Oh, Goddlemighty!” she burst out tempestuously, “I don’t want to be like her! I ain’t goin’ to, neither!”