and for the rest ate, sulked, and tried to sleep. The men gambled
among themselves, and I grew weary of the click, click of their balls
and the sound of their stupid boasts and low jesting. Yet I had no
ground for stopping them, for the woman understood almost nothing of
their uncouth speech. Indeed, she was little in sight or hearing. She
stayed in her bark shelter, and I could hear her moving about, trying
to keep it neat and herself in order. In those three days I learned
one secret of her spirit. She had a natural merriment that did not
seem a matter of will power nor even of wish. It was an instinctive,
inborn content, that was perhaps partly physical, in that it enabled
her to sleep well, and so to wake with zest and courage. By night her
eyes might be dark circled and her step slow, but each morning there
was interest in her looks to see what the strange day was about to
bring. I had seen this nature in men many times; I had not thought
that it belonged to women who are framed to follow rather than to look
ahead.

For twenty-four hours we held little more intercourse than dumb people,
but the second day she came to me.

"Monsieur, would you teach me?" she asked. "Would you explain to me
about the Indian dialects?"

I agreed. I threw her a blanket, which she wrapped around her, and we
cowered close to the bole of a pine. I took birch bark and a crayon
and turned schoolmaster, explaining that the Huron and Iroquois nations
came of the same stock, but that most of the western tribes were
Algonquin in blood, and that, though they had tribal differences in
speech, Algonquin was the basic language, as Latin is the root of all
our tongues at home. I took the damp bark, and wrote some phrases of