of our
past year's work, our encouragements, our difficulties and successes.

There has been an increasing spirit of loving, gentle, helpfulness
among our school girls, both in the home and school life. We have all
gladly noticed that our boys have become more courteous and
thoughtful. Many of them have learned for the first time, under their
wise and consecrated matron, the value of strict adherence to God's
great law of obedience in the forming of manly characters and in the
making of happy homes.

Our older Ree girls came back to school this fall more neatly and
cleanly clad than ever before. Some of them made tasteful calico
dresses for themselves with which to return to us. Several of these
older girls, under the leadership of one of our ladies, organized
themselves into a "Cleaning Club" at the close of school in July and
have kept faithfully at work all through the vacation, each week
meeting at a certain house and giving the poor little log home, with
its mud-plugged walls and dirt floor a most vigorous and thorough
"scrub." After the beds had been made up cleanly with sheets and
pillow cases, which were in each case the property of the school girl
at whose house they met, and putting up cheap scrim curtains at the
two little windows, then these students of scrubology, on a stove,
shining with a perhaps unprecedented coat of blacking, prepared before
their somewhat dazed parents a neat and wholesome meal of such simple
material as they had, set it out on a white covered table just as
nicely as they are taught to do at school, and invited their parents
to eat with them. This improvement has not been merely spontaneous. It
was a principle of the society that each girl who had been thus
assisted should do all in her power to keep the home clean and neat,
and our girls have greatly delighted us by the brave way in which they
have kept this pledge.

This past year several of our older boys and girls have, without
urging or even suggestion from the teachers, told us of their earnest
desire to go out into the world and attend a higher school. They were
quite prepared to enter the school at Santee and though reminded of
the opposition they would undoubtedly encounter in getting permission
from their ignorant and in some cases heathen parents, as well as that
of the Government Agent, they have still been quite determined.
"Maimie," one of the girls, first asked consent of her uncle and aunt
with whom she has her home