It took many trials before I learned how to knot my sinew thread on the point of my finger, as I saw her do.  Then the next difficulty was in keeping my thread stiffly twisted, so that I could easily string my beads upon it.  My mother required of me original designs for my lessons in beading.  At first I frequently ensnared many a sunny hour into working a long design.  Soon I learned from self-inflicted punishment to refrain from drawing complex patterns, for I had to finish whatever I began.

After some experience I usually drew easy and simple crosses and squares.  These were some of the set forms.  My original designs were not always symmetrical nor sufficiently characteristic, two faults with which my mother had little patience.  The quietness of her oversight made me feel strongly responsible and dependent upon my own judgment.  She treated me as a dignified little individual as long as I was on my good behavior; and how humiliated I was when some boldness of mine drew forth a rebuke from her!

In the choice of colors she left me to my own taste.  I was pleased with an outline of yellow upon a background of dark blue, or a combination of red and myrtle-green.  There was another of red with a bluish-gray that was more conventionally used.  When I became a little familiar with designing and the various pleasing combinations of color, a harder lesson was given me.  It was the sewing on, instead of beads, some tinted porcupine quills, moistened and flattened between the nails of the thumb and forefinger.  My mother cut off the prickly ends and burned them at once in the centre fire.  These sharp points were poisonous, and worked into the flesh wherever they lodged.  For this reason, my mother said, I should not do much alone in quills until I was as tall as my cousin Warca-Ziwin.

Always after these confining lessons I was wild with surplus spirits, and found joyous relief in running loose in the open again.  Many a summer afternoon a party of four or five of my playmates roamed over the hills with me.  We each carried a light sharpened rod about four feet long, with which we pried up certain sweet roots.  When we had eaten all the choice roots we chanced upon, we shouldered our rods and strayed off into patches of a stalky plant under whose yellow blossoms we found little crystal drops of gum.  Drop by drop we gathered this nature’s rock-candy, until each of us could boast of a lump the size of a small bird’s egg.  Soon satiated with its woody flavor, we tossed away our gum, to return again to the sweet roots.

I remember well how we used to exchange our necklaces, beaded belts, and sometimes even our moccasins.  We pretended to offer them as gifts to one another.  We delighted in impersonating our own mothers.  We talked of things we had heard them say in their conversations.  We imitated their various manners, even to the inflection of their voices.  In the lap of the prairie we seated ourselves upon our feet, and leaning our painted cheeks in the palms of our hands, we rested our elbows on our knees, and bent forward as old women were most accustomed to do.