Gretchen was the most advanced scholar in the school.  Her real mother had been an accomplished woman, and had taken great pains with her education.  She was well instructed in the English branches, and had read five books of Virgil in Latin.  Her reading had not been extensive, but it had embraced some of the best books in the English language.  Her musical education had been received from a German uncle, who had been instructed by Herr Wieck, the father of Clara Schumann.  He had been a great lover of Schumann’s dreamy and spiritual music, and had taught her the young composer’s pieces for children, and among them Romance and the Traumerei.  He had taught her to play the two tone poems together in changing keys, beginning with the Traumerei and returning again to its beautiful and haunting strains.  Gretchen interpreted these poems with all the color of true feeling, and under her bow they became enchantment to a musical ear and a delight to even as unmusical a soul as Mrs. Woods.

Gretchen’s chief literary pleasure had been the study of the German poets.  She had a poetic mind, and had learned to produce good rhymes.  The songs of Uhland, Heine, and Schiller delighted her.  She had loved to read the strange stories of Hoffman, and the imaginative works of Baron Fouque.  She used to aspire to be an author or poet, but these aspirations had received no countenance from Mrs. Woods, and yet the latter seemed rather proud to regard her ward as possessing a superior order of mind.

“If there is anything that I do despise,” Mrs. Woods used to say, “it is books spun out of the air, all about nothin’!  Dreams were made for sleep, and the day was made for work.  I haven’t much to be proud of in this world.  I’ve always been a terror to lazy people and to Injuns, and if any one were to write my life they’d have some pretty stirring stories to tell.  I have no doubt that I was made for something.”

Although Mrs. Woods boasted that she was a terror to Indians, she had been very apprehensive of danger since the Whitman colony massacre.  She talked bravely and acted bravely according to her view of moral courage, but with a fearful heart.  She dreaded the approaching Potlatch, and the frenzy that calls for dark deeds if the dance of the evil spirits should conclude the approaching feast.

There was a sullen look in Benjamin’s face as he silently took his seat in the log school-house the next morning.  Mr. Mann saw it, and instinctively felt the dark and mysterious atmosphere of it.  He went to him immediately after the opening exercises, and said: 

“You haven’t spoken to me this morning; what troubles you?”

The boy’s face met the sympathetic eye of the master, and he said: 

“I was happy on the morning when I came—­sun; she hate Indian, talk against him to you; make me unhappy—­shade; think I will have my revenge—­pil-pil; then music make me happy; you make me happy; night come, and I think of her—­she hate Indian—­shade.  Me will have my revenge—­pil-pil.  She say I have no right here; she have no right here; the land all belong to Umatilla; then to me; I no have her here.  Look out for the October moon—­Potlatch—­dance—­pil-pil.”