third day
separated. Croghan found my room before leaving with his party, and we
talked as well as we could, and shook hands at parting.

The impressions of that first year stay in my mind as I have heard the
impressions of childhood remain. It was perhaps a kind of brief
childhood, swift in its changes, and running parallel with the
development of youth.

My measure being sent to New York by De Chaumont, I had a complete new
outfit in clothes; coat, waistcoat, and small-clothes, neckwear,
ruffles, and shirts, buckle shoes, stockings of mild yarn for cold
weather, and thread stockings. Like most of the things for which we
yearn, when I got them I did not like them as well as the Indian
garments they obliged me to shed.

Skenedonk came to see me nearly every day, and sat still as long as he
could while I toiled at books. I did not tell him how nearly I had
disgraced us both by running secretly away to camp. So I was able to go
back and pay visits with dignity and be taken seriously, instead of
encountering the ridicule that falls upon retreat.

My father was neither pleased nor displeased. He paid my accounts
exactly, before the camp broke up for the winter, making Skenedonk his
agent. My mother Marianne offered me food as she would have offered it
to Count de Chaumont; and I ate it, sitting on a mat as a guest. Our
children, particularly the elder ones, looked me over with gravity, and
refrained from saying anything about my clothes.

Our Iroquois went north before snow flew, and the cabins stood empty,
leaves drifting through fire-holes in the bark thatch.

There have been students greedy of knowledge. I seemed hollow with the
fasting of a lifetime. My master at first tried to bind me to times; he
had never encountered so boundless an appetite. As soon as I woke in the
morning I reached for a book, and as days became darker, for tinder to
light a candle. I studied incessantly, dashing out at intervals to lake
or woods, and returning after wild activity, with increased zest to the
printed world. My mind appeared to resume a faculty it had suspended,
and to resume with incredible power. Magnetized by books, I cared for
nothing else. That first winter I gained hold on English and Latin, on
French reading, mathematics, geography, and history. My master was an
Oxford man, and when roused from dawdling, a scholar. He grew foolishly
proud and fond of what he called my prodigious advance.

De Chaumont's library was a l