THE MOUNTAIN SCHOOL-TEACHER By Melville Davisson Post D. Appleton and Company New York, London 1922 [Illustration: 0001] [Illustration: 0002] [Illustration: 0003] [Illustration: 0007] THE MOUNTAIN SCHOOL-TEACHER CHAPTER I |THERE had once been a path along the backbone of the mountain, but the wilderness had undertaken to remove it, and had almost succeeded. The wind had gathered bits of moss, twigs and dead stuff into the slight depression. The great hickories had covered it with leaves. The rain had packed it. There was no longer a path, only an open way between the trees running down the gentle slope of the ridge to the mountain road. The ridge was heavily wooded. The primeval forest was there. Great hickories shot up sixty feet without a limb, and so close that a man putting out his hand could reach from one tree to another. A gigantic poplar now and then arose, a sugar maple, an oak--huge at the butt, deep rooted in the good soil. The afternoon sun, excluded of the forest, seemed to pack itself into this abandoned path. The leaves fallen from the hickories, under the touch of waning summer, took on now, by the magic of this sun, golden tones of red and yellow. Woodpeckers hammered on the great trees along this path. Insects moved between the branches, the wild bee, the hornet, the yellow butterfly, as though the aerial life of the woods had been drawn here to the sun. A man was coming through the forest along this abandoned path. He walked slowly, his hands behind him, his head bare. He was a very young man--at that period of life when, within a day, as by the crossing of some unmarked line, the boy becomes a man. There was about him the vigor, the freshness, the joy of youth, under a certain maturity. He was not above middle height, his face was oval, his eyes gray-blue, his hair of that soft rich brown which a touch of the sun burnishes into a living yellow; the mouth was sensitive and mobile. There was a marked contrast between the man and the wild, rugged, primitive country in which he appeared. His hands were firm and white, and his skin was not in the least discolored by sun or weather. Now and then the man stopped and looked up at the dappled woodpeckers, and the swarms of yellow butterflies, gathered here along this sunlit path as though to welcome his arrival, and his mouth relaxed into an eager, luminous smile, as though, despite his maturity, he retained a child's sense of some universal kinship with all living things. He came down the long ridge toward the place where the mountain road crossed the low gap.