fashioned boy, for I never played in my life. Games ojf ball, marbles, and the like, are to me still mys terious as the rites in a Pagan temple. I then knew nothing at all of men. Cattle and horses I under stand thoroughly. But somehow I could not under stand or get on with my fellow man. He seemed to always want to cheat me to get my labour for nothing. I could appreciate and enter into the heart of an Indian. Perhaps it was because he was natural ; a child of nature ; nearer to God than the white man. I think what I most needed in order to understand, get on and not be misunderstood, was a long time at school, where my rough points could be ground down. The schoolmaster should have taken me between his thumb and finger and rubbed me about till I was as smooth and as round as the others. Then I should have been put out in the society of other smooth pebbles, and rubbed and ground against them till I got as smooth and pointless as they. You must not have points or anything about you singular or notice able if you would get on. You must be a pebble, a smooth, quiet pebble. Be a big pebble if you can, a small pebble if you must. But be a pebble just like the rest, cold, and hard, and sleek, and smooth, and you are all right. But I was as rough as the lava rocks I roamed over, as broken as the mountains I inhabited ; neither a man nor a boy.
How I am running on about myself, and yet how pleasant is this forbidden fruit ! The world says you must not talk of yourself. The world is a tyrant.
