Ethel Morton at Chautauqua

by Mabell S. C. Smith

"It seems to me she is qualifying to become a member herself if she is giving her time in the afternoons to helping out with all these costumes."

"I come across people every day who are just like that, dear Gran. Chautauqua is the greatest place in the world, I believe, for co-operation and helpfulness."

"Helpfulness and kindliness and loyalty make up the 'Chautauqua spirit.' You've probably discovered that that is a very real thing."

"It's what makes everybody go about speaking to people they'd just stare at at home."

"And finding out that they're interesting after all."

Over her sewing for several afternoons to come Helen thought many times of her conversation with her grandmother and she was keenly delighted when Mrs. Emerson and Mrs. Morton went to the School of Mothercraft and found themselves as pleased with its purposes and its way of carrying them out as Helen herself had been.

"We think we are making a new occupation for women out of her oldest occupation," smiled the head of the school. "We are organizing women's natural abilities and the duties that have been hers time out of mind in a modern way that will fit her to be a good mother and housekeeper in her own household or some other woman's, or to teach homecraft to students just as we are doing here. We've already had more applications than we have been able to fill for Mothercraft teachers to go to the West."

Meanwhile, as Roger had predicted, every part of the grounds was "infested," as he described it, with groups of people rehearsing for the pageant. In the hall of the School of Physical Education the minuet was being practiced whenever the gymnastic classes left the floor free for an hour; the reader with the Water Sprites and Flower Sprites and the bold representatives of the Wind and the Sun foregathered in the largest room of the School of Expression; Indian men and boys stamped and grunted in the Boys' Club, while the Girls' Club was the scene of the squaws' Dance of Grief. La Salle and Brule and Celoron spent an anxious life warily dodging the people who wanted to capture them for rehearsals, and only submitted to having their measurements taken on condition that they should not be asked to try on their costumes until the day of the performance. It was Helen and Margaret and their classmates who were making them but they were so absorbed in doing all these extra matters in addition to their regular club tasks and pleasures that they felt it would only add one more thrill if at this last-minute trying-on all the costumes should be proved misfits and have to be made over in one day!

Nothing of the sort happened, however, though there were dress rehearsals at seven o'clock in the morning of the appointed day, when early risers saw braves in full war paint flocking to the lake front, with a tread not as stealthy as it would be at night when boots should be exchanged for moccasins.

The scenes were staged on a large raft anchored in the lake before the hotel and girt with low bushes so that it looked like an island. The observers assembled on the lawn that sloped from the hotel to the water, and spread along the pebbly beach. Those in front brought camp chairs or sat cross-legged on the ground and those behind looked over their heads. Strong lights were thrown on the improvised island from electric lights with reflectors. Mr. and Mrs. Emerson and Mrs. Morton were so fortunate as to secure comfortable and convenient positions.