sister cannot play the games, or motion in one song, or even have an
ugly green dress. I am not sorry that your big and little sister cannot
come to school, and very much I wish I had not learned the motto."

Here the young Sioux girl, who was compelled to battle with hereditary
pride and stubbornness in every effort to do right, forgot the white
mother's admonition that the heart might be a dark place and a cold
place needing to be cleansed of evil thoughts.

Hannah Straight Tree did not hunt the dustpan, but with perseverance
worthy of a better cause, she brushed the sweepings from her floor and
stairs upon a ragged palm-leaf fan which she discovered in a corner,
and, dropping them into the scrub-pail, took them out of doors. Cordelia
brought a shoe-box from her cupboard in the playroom and applied it as
an inconvenient dustpan. Meanwhile dustpan Number 8 remained in the
darkest corner of the middle dormitory closet, where it had been pushed
in the rush of clearing up the day before.

Cordelia Running Bird's work of making clean her floor and stairs was
even harder than she had expected. Never had there seemed so many
errands to and fro by those who did the weekly cleaning in the three
dormitories, numbering quite a force. The thaw had ended in a freezing
snow squall in the night, but a sufficient quantity of mud was clinging
to the broad soles of the government shoes that tramped across
Cordelia's wet floor to insure a startling trail of footprints.

"I cannot keep them up, they come again so fast," she murmured to
herself in grim despair, while wringing out her mop-rag to attack a line
of tracks imprinted by the largest girl in school, in going to and from
the laundry to dispose of laid-off sheets and pillow-cases. "_Ver-ry