s heart, and he went away with drooping head.

Mrs. Wilcox took occasion one day to remonstrate with her niece. "Elsie,
you were very rude to Captain Curtis again to-day. He was deeply hurt."

"Now, aunt, don't _you_ try to convert me to a belief in that tin
soldier. He gets on my nerves."

"It would serve you right if he ordered us off the reservation. Your
remarks to-day before that young Mr. Streeter were very wrong and very
injudicious, and will be used in a bad cause. Captain Curtis is trying
to keep the peace here, and you are doing a great deal of harm by your
hints of his removal."

"I don't care. I intend to have him removed. I have taken a frightful
dislike to him. He is a prig and a hypocrite, and has no business to
come in here in this way, setting his low-down Indians up against the
settlers."

"That's just what he is trying _not_ to do, and if you weren't so
obstinate you'd see it and honor him for his good sense."

"Aunt, don't _you_ lecture me," cried the imperious girl. "I will not
allow it!"

In truth, Mrs. Wilcox's well-meant efforts at peace-making worked out
wrongly. Elsie became insufferably rude to Curtis, and her letters were
filled with the bitterest references to him and his work.

Lawson continued most friendly, and Curtis gladly availed himself of the
wide knowledge of primitive psychology which the ethnologist had
acquired. The subject of Indian education came up very naturally at a
little dinner which Jennie gave to the teachers and missionaries soon
after she opened house, and Lawson's remarks were very valuable to
Curtis. Lawson was talking to the principal of the central school. "We
should apply to the Indian problem the law of inherited aptitudes," he
said, slowly. "We should follow lines of least resistance. Fifty
thousand years of life proceeding in a certain way results in a certain
arrangement of brain-cells which can't be changed in a day, or even in a
generation. The red hunter, for example, was trained to endure hunger,
cold, and prolonged exertion. When he struck a game-trail he never left
it. His pertinacity was like that of a wolf. These qualities do not make
a market-gardener; they might not be out of place as a herder. We must
be patient while the redman makes the change from the hunter to the
herdsman. It is like mulching a young crab-apple and expecting it to
bear pippins."

"Patience is an unknown virtue in an Indian agent," remarked the
principal of the centra