LEARNING TO BE A LADY.
The books sent for by Mr. Howitt came a few days after the adventure at
the ranch, and Sammy, with all the intensity of her nature, plunged at
once into the work mapped out for her by the shepherd.
All through the long summer and autumn, the girl spent hours with her
teacher out on the hillside. Seated on some rocky bench, or reclining
on the grassy slope, she would recite the lessons he gave her, or
listen to him, as he read aloud from character forming books, pausing
now and then to slip in some comment to make the teaching clear, or to
answer her eager questions.
At other times, while they followed the sheep, leisurely, from one
feeding ground to another, he provoked her to talk of the things they
were reading, and, while he thus led her to think, he as carefully
guarded her speech and language.
At first they took the old familiar path of early intellectual
training, but, little by little, he taught her to find the way for
herself. Always as she advanced, he encouraged her to look for the life
that is more than meat, and always, while they read and talked
together, there was opened before them the great book wherein God has
written, in the language of mountain, and tree, and sky, and flower,
and brook, the things that make truly wise those who pause to read.
From her mother, and from her own free life in the hills, Sammy had a
body beautiful with the grace and strength of perfect physical
womanhood. With this, she had inherited from many generations of
gentle-folk a mind and spirit susceptible of the highest culture.
Unspoiled by the hot-house, forcing process, that so often leaves the
intellectual powers jaded and weak, before they have fully developed,
and free from the atmosphere of falsehood and surface culture, in which
so many souls struggle for their very existence, the girl took what her
teacher had to offer and made it her own. With a mental appetite
uninjured by tit-bits and dainties, she digested the strong food, and
asked eagerly for more.
Her progress was marvelous, and the old scholar often had cause to
wonder at the quickness with which his pupil’s clear mind grasped the
truths he showed her. Often before he could finish speaking, a bright
nod, or word, showed that she had caught the purpose of his speech,
while that wide eager look, and the question that followed, revealed
her readiness to go on. It was as though many of the things he sought
to teach her slept already in her brain, and needed only a touch to
arouse them to vigorous life.
In time, the girl’s very clothing, and even her manner of dressing her
hair, came to reveal the development and transformation of her inner
self; not that she dressed more expensively; she could not do that; but
in the selection of materials, and in the many subtle touches that give
distinction even to the plainest apparel, she showed her awakening. To
help her in this, there was Aunt Mollie and a good ladies’ magazine,
which came to her regularly, through the kindness of her teacher.
Sammy’s father, too, came unconsciously under the shepherd’s influence.
As his daughter grew, the man responded to the change in her, as he
always responded to her every thought and mood. He talked often now of
the old home in the south land, and sometimes fell into the speech of
other days, dropping, for a moment, the rougher expressions of his
associates. But all this was to Sammy alone. To the world, there was no
change in Jim, and he still went on his long rides with Wash Gibbs. By
fall, the place was fixed up a bit; the fence was rebuilt, the yard
trimmed, and another room added to the cabin.
So the days slipped away over the wood fringed ridges. The soft green
of tree, and of bush, and grassy slope changed to brilliant gold, and
crimson, and russet brown, while the gray blue haze that hangs always
over the hollows took on a purple tone. Then in turn this purple
changed to a deeper, colder blue, when the leaves had fallen, and the
trees showed naked against the winter sky.
With the cold weather, the lessons were continued in the Lane cabin on
the southern slope of Dewey. All day, while the shepherd was busy at
the ranch, Sammy pored over her books; and every evening the old
scholar climbed the hill to direct the work of his pupil, with long Jim
sitting, silent and grim, by the fireside, listening to the talk, and
seeing who knows what visions of the long ago in the dancing flame.
And so the winter passed, and the spring came again; came, with its
soft beauty of tender green; its wealth of blossoms, and sweet
fragrance of growing things. Then came the summer; that terrible
summer, when all the promises of spring were broken; when no rain fell
for weary months, and the settlers, in the total failure of their
crops, faced certain ruin.