"You see there was no one to take care of me but my grandfather. One day a missionary prevailed upon him to send me to the Indian school at Ream's cañon. I stayed there until I was sixteen years old. I became much interested in my work, and at the end of my last year at Ream's cañon I was told that I was to be sent east to the Carlisle School in Pennsylvania. I look back upon that day as the happiest of my life—no, I won't say that, either, for the day I left Carlisle was a great day to me. It had been told me every day that I should go back to my people and show them the error of their ways. It was with a happy feeling of duty and responsibility that I started west.
"But what a fool I was! I hate to think about it. When I arrived in Oribi in my Eastern clothes I immediately became the laughing-stock of the village. Every time I spoke I was either jeered at by my companions or rebuked by my elders. The young men of the village made unpleasant remarks about me as I passed, and the old men and women upbraided me for having no respect for my ancestors' customs and traditions. I endured their reproaches and sneers for a long while, but at last I gave up in despair, threw away my Eastern clothes and my Eastern manners with them. Then I left Oribi and came here to live with a distant relative and to forget the past.
"I thought of going back to Pennsylvania, of clerking in a store, of doing housework and all that sort of thing; but after a time I gave it all up and resigned myself to my fate."
"And what did fate have in store for you?" asked the doctor.
She answered, smiling, "A husband."
"Now you are wrapped up in your children and are happy?"
"No, I have no children. My only child died when it was but six months old. It took a fever, and when I saw that it was in danger I tried to get my husband to go to Winslow for a physician, but it was all in vain. He would not listen. He feared the wrath of the chief and of the native priests. I saw it was no use, so I simply nursed my child until one night it died in my lap. The next day we took the little thing back to the graveyard up on the mesa and buried it with the regular Moqui ceremony."
"Well," said the doctor, after a pause, "what can be done for the Moquis?"
"Nothing. Let them alone. They are happy now, and, you know, 'where ignorance is bliss 'tis folly to be wise.'"
In the meantime the "chuck wagon" had gone by, and the doctor rose to leave. He offered to send her some books and magazines, but she begged him not to do so, saying that she wanted to forget such things.