Pine Mountain Settlement School
Series 17: PUBLICATIONS PMSS
Dear Friend Letters
Fundraising 1911 to present
Ethel de Long
“The Fourth Grade”
1929

---

TAGS: Dear Friends Letters, Ethel de Long, Pine Mountain Settlement School, appeal letter, Martha Callahan, fourth grade,  “big” Enoch, Robin Hood Play, Knights of the Round Table

---

DEAR FRIEND LETTERS 1929 The Fourth Grade

GALLERY

TRANSCRIPTION

P. 1

The Fourth Grade

THE long and the short of them sit side by side in our Fourth Grade, the elfin child, Martha Callahan, and big Enoch, who surely was designed by nature for the part of Little John in our recent Robin Hood play. Clumsy fingers that have held the plow-stock season after season grow more limber each week in the management of the pencil, and three boys who could not write their names a year ago fairly glow if their teacher proposes that they write a letter.

Martha and Cam and the other little ones have been with us since their tiny childhood, and have come up the grades by the customary slow stages. These eighteen and twenty-year-old boys had no chance at schooling when they were young, but awakened ambition has brought them up from the primer class in three months.

Edward’s pride in his reading is irresistible.

We all beam over his achievement, and the whole class smiles because the teacher says she would like to have him read aloud to her if she were a blind old lady. When twenty-year-old Nobe {Andy ?] brought his gun with its four notches to Miss Pettit and gave up the pursuit of his father’s enemy, he entered the First Reader. The other day he read a sentence with the word “knights” in it. “What are knights?” I asked. Bewilderment on the face that is so alive when he knows an answer. Then, “Thar’s a difference between k-n-i-g-h-t and n-i-g-h-t, haint they?” He must have the Tales of the Round Table for his first Christmas at Pine Mountain, must he not, this boy who chose against every wish and urging of kinsmen to give up vengeance and seek wisdom? And the biggest one of all,

P. 2 

his face lighted from within and shining with cleanliness and a fresh shave without, thus summed up what a year at School has done for him: “Why, I wouldn’t look at the girl I’d have married two years ago!” As his housemother was telling him the other day of a splendid nephew she had brought up, he burst in with a child’s naivete, “Do you think I could find someone to bring me up that way?”

We hope the long and the short of them will always sit side by side at Pine Mountain. It ought to be a place where little children will develop naturally, and where big ones may have made up to them what they lost in early years. The privilege of the Fourth Grade costs us $I50.00 a year for each child. Can you help us to give it to them for a week, or a month, or longer?

-ETHEL DELONG ZANDE

$3 .15 will feed a child for one week

9.00 feeds our dairy herd for one day I 5. oo provides a month’s scholarship

30 .00 provides living expenses for one worker for one month

97.00 more a day will keep us out of debt 1

38.00 runs the School, the Medical Settlement and the Line Fork Settlement for a day

1,700.00 a month pays all our salaries.

---

PINE MOUNTAIN SETTLEMENT SCHOOL
INCORPORATED

Treasurer, MR. C. N. MANNING
Security Trust Co., Lexington, Ky.

Executive Committee
Miss KATHERINE PETTIT
MRS. ETHEL DELONG ZANDE

The School is endorsed by the
National Information Bureau

---

SEE ALSO:
EDUCATION
ETHEL DE LONG ZANDE Director
ETHEL DE LONG ZANDE WRITINGS and Publications Guide

Return To:
DEAR FRIEND LETTERS Index