yet it is a subject which has scarcely been touched, and
affords today a rare and prolific field for some gifted writer
of child stories. Untrammeled by the world's customs, and
having but a limited knowledge of its books, he is one cf the
freest and most independent of thinkers. His originality
stamps every crude composition, every invention, every
utterance, and every effort as something different from the
hackneyed phrases and efforts employed by the masses of
children of this age. It is a delight to read of the sayings
and doings of an original child; but it is better to develop
and utilize him, and to apply his originality to the science,
art. literature and invention of the world.
    Ambition and loyalty, two well-known traits of the
mountain child, have already been too widely advertised by
his fathers. Not to blood-thirstiness must be attributed
the feuds which have arrayed clan against clan, but to a
loyalty which knows no satisfaction in giving or requiring
less than life itself, and to an ambition which prefers
notoriety to obscurity, condemnation to oblivion, and which
accepts the world's scorn rather than escape the world's
notice. The call of the feud is but the call of this ambition
-an ambition to achieve, to excel, to display his prowess,
to overcome; or the call of a loyalty which has threaded
itself down to him through the generations from his early
ancestors, the Scottish clansman. Such an ambition, pro-
perly directed, might mean an achievement of no inferior
order; and such loyalty under cultivation, may become sup-
port of church, organization, State or nation so unswerving
that neither need fear his desertion, treason, or failure of
duty.
    Whatever may be said of the ignorance of the mountain
child, he is wiser than many learned men in his knowledge
of God. Religious fervor and reverence for his Creator are
instincts as lasting within him as his immortal soul. Men
of affairs and large responsibilities may feel that they can
assume and direct such without invoking divine aid and
guidance; but The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come knows
that when he is "only a boy" and must rise to the occasion
"and ack like a man," it will require the sustainirg power
of the Omnipotent. The mountain child is devout in the
days of his youth, and among his fathers you will find no
atheists.
7