CHAPTER IV.—John Calvin Campbell and Dorothy Fairfax. John Calvin Campbell was a beautiful child, with strangely clear, deep blue eyes, close clinging golden curls, a complexion fair to paleness, though tinted to a delicate ruddiness by exposure. He was thoroughly self-reliant and independent. The neighbors spoke of him as a strange boy; not that he was mentally or physically weak; but his manner and thoughts and method of expression were unnatural in one so young. His mother looked after him with such solicitude that his father, half vexed, said: “You are spoiling that boy; give him a chance to live his own life; I want him to find interest and pleasure in the same things other boys do.” “If you do, you are going to be disappointed; he is not like other boys. He is more like his grandfather than little David Clark. He is not contentious, yet without apparent effort, for the mere asking, he seems to have his way with other children. Though he is just seven and wanders about the mountain side alone, I am not worried. When I remonstrated, he replied with calm assurance: ‘Mother, you need not worry, I will not get hurt, I am learning things;’ I have come to believe that what he said is true. I asked why he climbed out upon the Pinnacle Rock and he answered: ‘When on the big rock, I think and learn and see things I cannot here. I see earth and heaven as one great whole.’ The boy seems not to mind in the least being alone; though he often acts as guide for one of the older boys to the rock, any one of whom will quit his games to go. Several times when he went off alone, I followed and unseen watched him climb carefully to the Pinnacle, where, finding a seat not too near the edge, he sat looking out over the Valley and seemed to dream in wide-eyed wonder. The birds flew about as though he were not there; and the little ground squirrels that burrow in the rocks came out and sat up and rubbed their faces and combed their bushy tails within a foot of his hand. When he rose up to come home he held out his little hands towards the valley as though he would take all that he saw within his tiny arms saying: ‘O the joy of it! the joy of it!’ What are we to do with a boy like that? Let us watch over him carefully and let us follow the way God leads. Sometime have him tell you what he sees.” He began making his little journeys to the rocks when he was five years old; first with his mother or Ruth, then alone. Each day from the spring of 1773 until the following May, his little feet wore a distinct and narrow path from the kitchen door to his aerie. The people of the Valley seeing the little boy on the big rock, called it John Calvin’s Rock; and it is so called to this day, though very few know the reason. A local historian writing of the early Presbyterian settlements of the Valley, making fact fit theory, refers to the rock as having in some unknown way been called after the father of Calvinism.