There was another cause which was more difficult, but which enlisted all Steve's best endeavour. Mountain children are apt to know the taste of liquor from babyhood, but Steve had never liked it and neither had his mother. Occasionally parents, especially fathers, when they visited the school would bring the children bottles of "moonshine" to hide and drink from as they pleased, and the teachers found Steve a great helper, though his corps of "regulators" could not always be relied upon. In the midst of his interesting, new surroundings Steve's mind often went back to the rock where Tige lay and to the grave of his "mammy." How pleased she would be, he thought again and again,--maybe she was--that he was where he could "larn things." He soon began to write letters to Mr. Polk, and a steady improvement was noted all winter in these letters. There was always a great deal in them about Miss Grace, for she seemed to make him her special charge and the two were great friends. She loved to walk in the woods and talk with Steve, hearing him tell many interesting things which he had learned from intimate association with birds and animals. Sometimes she would take his hand at the top of a hill and together they would race down, laughing and breathless to the bottom. After such a run, one day, they halted by the bank of a stream beneath one of the grand old beeches for which Kentucky is famous. "Oh, Steve," she exclaimed enthusiastically, "what a beautiful old beech this is. How symmetrical its giant trunk, how perfect its development of each branch and twig, while it pushes up into the sky higher than all its fellows, gets more sunshine than all the rest, has the prettiest growth of ferns and violets at its base,--and I just know the birds and squirrels love it best!" Miss Grace had a bubbling, contagious enthusiasm, and Steve followed her expressive gestures as she pointed out each detail of perfection with answering admiration. "Steve!" She turned suddenly and bent her eyes upon him with still more radiant emphasis. "I want you to be just such a grand specimen of a man! Big and strong and well developed,--pushing up into the sky further than all the rest about you, getting more sunshine than any one else--making little plants to grow and blossom all about you and drawing to you the sweetest and best in life!" He smiled back into her shining eyes, somewhat bewildered, but with an earnest: "I shore will try, Miss Grace, but I don't know just what you mean." "I mean I want you to study hard, to develop every power of mind and body you have, and then,--give your life for the uplift of the children of the mountains." She did not press him for a promise, nor linger upon the subject, but the first dim outline of that mystic height of the boy's vision had been traced.