ady I had left, fawning upon her with their eyes, their
hearts filled with as true chivalry as ever animated knight or champion
of the olden time. Tall, upstanding fellows of sixteen or seventeen,
clean-limbed and broad-shouldered, wild-run all their lives; hunters,
with a tale of big game to the credit of some of them would make an
English sportsman envious; unaccustomed to any restraint at all and
prone to chafe at the slightest; unaccustomed to any respect for women,
to any of the courtesies of life, I saw them fly at a word, at a look,
to do her bidding, saw cap snatched from head if they encountered her
about the buildings, saw them jump up and hold open the door if she
moved to pass out of a room, saw the eager devotion that would have
served her upon bended knee had they thought it would please her. It was
wonderful, the only thing of quite its kind I had ever seen in my life.

When early in the school's history an old medicine-man at Nenana had
been roused to animosity by her refusal to countenance an offensive
Indian custom touching the adolescent girls, and had defiantly announced
his intention to make medicine against her, I can see her now, her staff
in her hand, attended by two or three of her devoted youths, invading
the midnight pavilion of the conjurer, in the very midst of his
conjurations, tossing his paraphernalia outside, laying her staff
smartly across the shoulders of the trembling shaman, and driving the
gaping crew helter-skelter before her, their awe of the witchcraft
overawed by her commanding presence. I make no apology that I thought of
the scourge of small cords that was used on an occasion in the temple at
Jerusalem, when I heard of it. It gave a shrewder blow to the lingering
tyrannical superstition of the medicine-man than decades of preaching
and reasoning would have done. No man living could have done the thing
with like effect, nor any woman save one of her complete self-possession
and natural authority. The younger villagers chuckle over the jest of it
to this day, and the old witch-doctor himself was crouching at her feet
and, as one may say, eating out of her hand, within the year.

I saw these boys again, in my mind's eye, gone back to their homes here
and there on the Yukon and the Tanana after their two or three years at
this school, carrying with them some better ideal of human life than
they could ever get from the elders of the tribe, from the little sordid
village trader, fro