In the evening some women and children from the mountains came to the circuit judge and asked him for the body of the School-teacher. He gave it to them, and at night they took it away. An ox, led by a little boy, bore the body, and women walking beside it supported it with their hands. They traveled back into the mountains. And at daybreak they laid the body in a grave which they had made between the two great hickories on the ridge beyond Nicholas Parks' house. They lined the grave with bright-colored leaves, and wrapped the body in that piece of linen which the School-teacher had bade the miller keep for him until he should need it. The hands of women and children filled the grave with earth. Then they went away down the mountain, toward the mill, leaving a woman crouched beside the grave. Her apron covering her yellow hail. Her body rocking. It was morning. They went down the mountain, the boy and the ox, the little girl, the two remaining women--one of them carrying a tiny sleeping hoy wrapped in a shawl, a dog beside her. On a bench of the mountain below, where a tree, uprooted by the wind, lay with its broken trunk pointing toward the ridge, they stopped and looked back. As they looked, the sun arose, a disc of gold between the two great hickories. With a wild harking, the dog leaped onto the fallen trunk, ran out to the projecting end of it, and stood there looking toward the sun. The tiny boy moved 'n his mother's arms. “Nim see Teacher,” he said. End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Mountain School-Teacher, by Melville Davisson Post