rom a spree, and was so wrought upon that when he came out he was a
different creature, a new man, the old life with its appetite for
vicious indulgence sloughed off and left behind him, and he now
possessed with a burning desire to do some such active service for God
as aforetime he had done for the devil. After three or four months of
some sort of training in an institution maintained by the California
Society of Friends--a body more like the Salvation Army, one judges,
than the old Quakers--he volunteered for service at a branch which the
old-established mission of the Society at the mouth of the Kobuk desired
to plant two hundred miles or so up the river, and had come out and had
plunged at once into his task. So here he was, some six or seven months
installed, teacher, preacher, trader in a small way, and indefatigable
worker in general. Pedagogical training or knowledge of "methods" he had
none at all, but the root of the matter was in him, and surely never was
such an insatiable school-teacher. Morning, noon, and night he was
teaching. While he was cooking he was hearing lessons; while he was
washing the dishes and cleaning the house he was correcting exercises in
simple addition. In the schoolroom he was full of a genial enthusiasm
that seemed to impart instruction by sheer dynamic force. "Boot," the
lesson book said. There was no boot in the schoolroom, all were shod in
mukluks. He dives into his dwelling-house attachment and comes back
holding up a boot. "Boot," he says, and "boot" they all repeat.
Presently the word "tooth" was introduced in the lesson. Withdrawing a
loose artificial tooth of the "pivot" variety from his upper jaw, he
holds it aloft and "tooth!" he cries out, and "toot!" they all cry, and
he claps it back into his head again.

We were present on Sunday at the services. There was hearty singing of
"Pentecostal" hymns with catchy refrains, but we were compelled to
notice again what we had noticed amongst the little bands of these
people on the Koyukuk when we set them to singing, that the English was
unintelligible; and since it conveyed no meaning to us could have had
little for them. This is the inevitable result of ignoring the native
tongue and adopting the easy expedient of teaching the singing of hymns
and the recitation of formulas like the commandments in English. For a
generation or two, at least, the English learned, save by children at a
boarding-school, where nothing but English is s