m most of the whites they would be thrown with,
keeping something of the vision of gentle womanhood, something of the
"unbought grace of life," something of the keen sense of truth and
honour, of the nobility of service, something deeper and stronger than
mere words of the love of God, which they had learned of her whom they
all revered; each one, however much overflowed again by the surrounding
waters of mere animal living, tending a little shrine of sweeter and
better things in his heart.

[Sidenote: LONG-REMEMBERED TEACHING]

Here, three years after the visit and the journey narrated, when these
words are written with diaries and letters and memoranda around me, I am
just come from a long native powwow, a meeting of all the Indians of a
village for the annual election of a village council, important in the
evolution of that self-government we covet for these people, but
undeniably tedious. And, because at our missions we seek to associate
with us every force that looks to the betterment of the natives, we had
invited the new government teacher, a lady of long experience in Indian
schools, to be present. She had sat patiently through the protracted
meeting, and at its close, when she rose to go, a young Indian man
jumped up and held her fur cloak for her and put it gently about her
shoulders. When she had thanked him she asked with a smile: "Where did
you learn to be so polite?" A gleam came into the fellow's eyes, then he
dropped them and replied, "Miss Farthing taught me."

Two days before, returning from a journey, I had spent the night at a
road-house kept by a white man married to an Indian woman. There was
excellent yeast bread on the table, and good bread is a rare thing in
Alaska. "Where did you learn to make such good bread?" I inquired of the
woman. There came the same light to her eyes and the same answer to her
lips. Yet it was nine years ago, long before the school at Nenana was
started, that this Indian boy and girl had been under Miss Farthing's
teaching at Circle City.

They tell us there is no longer much place or use for gentility in the
world, for men and women nurtured and refined above the common level;
tell us in particular that woman is only now emancipating herself from
centuries of ineffectual nonage, only now entering upon her active
career.

Yet I am of opinion, from such opportunities to observe and compare as
my constant travel has given me, that the quiet work of this gracious
woman