meetings since their sophomore year. It
was a club that took pleasure in being exclusive, and had little regard
for the point of view of the excluded. How foolish it was of them to
feel sore or resentful! Rosey Bernstein, undoubtedly a star pupil, was
vulgarly witty at the expense of the club and its unimportant secrets and
foolish little mysteries.

There had never been any question about Stella’s membership—Stella whom
she and two or three others had been inclined to persecute in the early
days, but had given it up when they found to their surprise that the
word “Indian” was held a title of honor, rather than a term of reproach.
In scholarship they were neck and neck; but what won Rosey completely was
the Indian girl’s unaffected admiration of the fat Bernstein baby, of
whom the wholefallen to some degree under
the spell of that colorful, elemental existence.

The zest of the open spaces and the free winds, the absence of clocks
and bells and whistles and other insistent reminders and regulators of
our time-slavery, the fascinating simplicity and friendliness of the
dark-faced, smiling people—_her_ people—in their easy, picturesque garb,
all these had seemed so restful, so almost intoxicating, after the set
tasks of many well-ordered years.

When they reached camp and threw down their burdens under the shade of a
large arbor of boughs, where an old woman with gray witch-locks flying
loose and a skin like dark-brown parchment looked up from her eternal
moccasin-mending, and a long-haired dog not much bigger than a rat flew
to greet them with all but articulate cries of joy—then, indeed, they
were at home!

“Sh-h-h-Sheka!” Blue Earth was tired and