an' I gits a better Christian every year."

Always Hale took some children's book for June when he went to
Lonesome Cove, and she rarely failed to know it almost by heart
when he went again. She was so intelligent that he began to wonder
if, in her case, at least, another of the Hon. Sam's theories
might not be true--that the mountaineers were of the same class as
the other westward-sweeping emigrants of more than a century
before, that they had simply lain dormant in the hills and--a
century counting for nothing in the matter of inheritance--that
their possibilities were little changed, and that the children of
that day would, if given the chance, wipe out the handicap of a
century in one generation and take their place abreast with
children of the outside world. The Tollivers were of good blood;
they had come from Eastern Virginia, and the original Tolliver had
been a slave-owner. The very name was, undoubtedly, a corruption
of Tagliaferro. So, when the Widow Crane began to build a brick
house for her boarders that winter, and the foundations of a
school-house were laid at the Gap, Hale began to plead with old
Judd to allow June to go over to the Gap and go to school, but the
old man was firm in refusal:

"He couldn't git along without her," he said; "he was afeerd he'd
lose her, an' he reckoned June was a-larnin' enough without goin'
to school--she was a-studyin' them leetle books o' hers so hard."
But as his confidence in Hale grew and as Hale stated his
intention to take an option on the old man's coal lands, he could
see that Devil Judd, though his answer never varied, was
considering the question seriously.