I.

MY FIRST DAY.


Though an illness left me unable to continue my college course, my pride
kept me from returning to my mother. Had she known of my worn condition,
she would have said the white man's papers were not worth the freedom
and health I had lost by them. Such a rebuke from my mother would have
been unbearable, and as I felt then it would be far too true to be
comfortable.

Since the winter when I had my first dreams about red apples I had been
traveling slowly toward the morning horizon. There had been no doubt
about the direction in which I wished to go to spend my energies in a
work for the Indian race. Thus I had written my mother briefly, saying
my plan for the year was to teach in an Eastern Indian school. Sending
this message to her in the West, I started at once eastward.

Thus I found myself, tired and hot, in a black veiling of car smoke, as
I stood wearily on a street corner of an old-fashioned town, waiting
for a car. In a few moments more I should be on the school grounds,
where a new work was ready for my inexperienced hands.

Upon entering the school campus, I was surprised at the thickly
clustered buildings which made it a quaint little village, much more
interesting than the town itself. The large trees among the houses gave
the place a cool, refreshing shade, and the grass a deeper green. Within
this large court of grass and trees stood a low green pump. The queer
boxlike case had a revolving handle on its side, which clanked and