Boone heard the austere beauty of the service--but he felt more poignantly the picture that his eyes looked on: the coffin draped with two flags that overlapped their folds--though once a tide of cannon-smother ran between them--the Stars and Stripes of the Nation and the Stars and Bars of the Confederacy. On one hand, in a grizzled honour-guard, stood old men in the same mist grey that he had worn with a general's stars until Lee surrendered, and on the other hand was ranged an equally frosted and withered squad in Grand Army blue. Then at last a clear and flawless sweetness floated away from the lips of the militia bugler, who, in accordance with the General's wish, was sounding taps across his closing grave. Something rose in Boone Wellver's throat, and a strange idea stole, not facetiously but with reverent sincerity, into his thoughts. He wished it might have been possible for him to stand there as the clods fell, not as he stood now in the dress of a gentleman, but in homespun and butternut, clasping in his tight hands the coon-skin cap that his boyhood had known. For in this gathering, that was like a quiet pageant of passing eras, he stood for an elder thing than any other here. He was, in effect, by birth and by beginning, the ancestor of them all, for he had been born a pioneer! * * * * * The school, which had become a home to Happy Spradling, had grown marvellously since that day when the old mountaineer wrote with his donation of rocky acres: "I have heart and cravin' that our young people may grow better, and I deed my land to a school as long as the Constitution of the United States stands." It was a precarious undertaking with no endowment except its spirit, but it is not recorded that Elijah went hungry when his commissary was in the keeping of ravens--for back of the ravens was the Promise. From year to year, dependent upon the generosity of those whom its accomplishments convinced, the school not only existed but grew, and in order that the springs which fed it might not run dry there were, several times each year, the "begging trips" of the women who "went out." For that was the phrase they used, just as in all wilderness life it is the phrase with which men speak of journeys from the solitudes. When Miss Shorte went east or west, she carried to the outer world a living and vivid portraiture of that folk immured behind the ridge and its elder life. Then somehow the undertakings, absurdly impractical from a material viewpoint, realized themselves, and a new school building, a tiny hospital or a needed dormitory rose among the hardwood and the pines of Marlin County. In the fall of 1913 Miss Shorte brought east with her a younger woman also from the school, to sing for her audiences those quaint "song-ballets" that sound around smoky mountain hearths to the accompaniment of banjo and "dulcimore."