Thus in time there arose, gaunt against the skyline, the frame of the first college building in the Cumberlands. A sober, steady, quiet plebiscite went on. The entire population of the village was engaged. Many folk from the country around about came in. None asked questions. The common thing was for a man to arrive, and to lay off his coat. The least was said, and all was mended among these. The work of one strong, faith-keeping man had been done. There was not a weapon on the hill. Slowly, with incredible toil, the unskilled hands of these unpaid laborers advanced the task which they had set for themselves. Still the building extended itself against the skyline. About the bottom of the walls now slowly arose the covering of rough-hewn boards, so that it was more apparent what the finished structure would be, if ever it might be finished. The hill folk marveled at the vast size of this building, wondering at Davy Joslin when he told them there were yet larger in the world outside. Joslin worked steadily with the others, growing gaunter and gaunter as the weeks passed. A faint line of gray had come at his temples, though he yet was young. He had driven body and mind alike without mercy these last years. None the less, in these surroundings so familiar, among these friends so simple and sincere in their confidence, the soul of the man, so long sad and dour, began to thaw, to show itself beneath the wintry aspect of a nature wholly absorbed in a compelling purpose. To his lips came now more often the light jest, the grim quip, the merry retort, which once had marked him as a younger man. Day by day, not unsettling himself in the new respect in which they held him for his wider experience, he grew into, or fell back into, the old ways of the earlier days. At times when the work was done for the day and dusk had fallen, they would light a lamp in one of the more sheltered rooms of the unfinished building, and Joslin would read to them for an hour or so, explaining to them what he had read, telling them of the greater world of thought and activity in affairs, which lay beyond their knowledge, and thus proving to them all the better the need of this work in which they were engaged. No Homer of old was ever more a god to his listeners than David Joslin here in the rude structure of his unfinished building.