Abbie laughed and held them up, their creamy luster inappropriate against her work-worn hand. She put them around Margaret’s little sunburned neck, and they hung down over the dingy gray calico dress with incongruous comparison.

“You shall wear them, darling. Some day you shall. We’re going to make it come true. We’ve got to make it come true.” She caught Margaret to her. “It takes faith and courage and love and prayer and work and a little singing to keep up your spirits, but we’re going to do it.”

In September, Mack and Margaret started to school to a little new one-roomed frame building which some one already had christened the Woodpecker School. Little Emma Lutz started, too, and two more of the Reinmueller boys,—Christine’s idea being that it would be a good thing for them to know how to write their names, at least, and figure up bushels. On good days the children trudged the long grassy way, and on bad days, Will stopped his work long enough to take them in the wagon. Abbie shed copious tears the first morning they started, and then laughed at her own inconsistency.

“I wanted them to have a school closer than Sodom to go to, and then I cry when they do have,” she said to Will. But Will said he knew how she felt. Will was always so understanding, Abbie thought gratefully.

That winter of ’76 and ’77 was another one of great hardship, but like many things in life, it had its pleasant side. A reading circle was formed and met at Woodpecker School every Friday night. Its members wore ribbon badges upon which Sarah Lutz and Abbie had printed the mysterious letters “S.C.L.R.C.,” which, when the mystery was eliminated, were discovered to stand for the title of Stove Creek Precinct Literary Reading Circle. The membership was divided, like all Gaul, into three parts, and if there were not Belgians, Helvetians and Germans who fought and bled, at least, the “Reds,” the “Blues,” and the “Yellows” met in forensic frays. On one Friday night the “Reds” performed, the next two Fridays the “Blues” and “Yellows” respectively, and on the fourth Friday night a big contest was staged, in which the star members of the various colors mingled in one grand rainbow spectrum, with people imported from outside the precinct sitting in judgment upon the efforts. That winter the schooner Hesperus was wrecked, little Paul Dombey died, Hamlet met his father’s ghost and the Raven quothed more times than there were meetings,—new “pieces” being at a premium, as they were.

Whole families came, ensconced on straw in the bottom of wagon-boxes which had been put upon bob-sleds. Every one brought heated soap-stones or hot flat-irons, as more than one load came from twenty miles away. The Henry Lutzes brought their reed-organ in the sleigh each time, so there was always music. Abbie was put on for a group of songs whenever the “Blues” performed, and always led the chorus singing. “Three Blind Mice” and “Scotland’s Burning” were the favorite rounds. As for the favorite choruses, while great partiality was shown toward “Juanita,” “Annie Laurie” and “Revive Us Again,” for sheer volume there was nothing like “Pull For the Shore” to open the throttle. Young blades who could not carry a tune were filled with an irresistible impulse to sing whenever the life-line was brought out, and when the sailors began to make more rapid progress toward the lighthouse, they would grab oars, as it were, open their mouths and bellow like young steers.