There Eliza Ballou made her home, cheerfully helping at the house or in the field, as was then sometimes the custom in a pioneer country.

Having something more than what at that day was an ordinary education, Eliza procured about twenty pupils, and taught a summer school.
"The school-house was one of the most primitive kind, and stood in the edge of dense and heavily-timbered woods.

One day there came up a fearful storm of wind and rain, accompanied by thunder and lightning.
The woods were badly wrecked, but the wind left the old log-house uninjured.

Not so the lightning.

A bolt struck a tree that projected closely over the roof, and then the roof itself.