Skenedonk came to see me nearly every day, and sat still as long as he could while I toiled at books.  I did not tell him how nearly I had disgraced us both by running secretly away to camp.  So I was able to go back and pay visits with dignity and be taken seriously, instead of encountering the ridicule that falls upon retreat.

My father was neither pleased nor displeased.  He paid my accounts exactly, before the camp broke up for the winter, making Skenedonk his agent.  My mother Marianne offered me food as she would have offered it to Count de Chaumont; and I ate it, sitting on a mat as a guest.  Our children, particularly the elder ones, looked me over with gravity, and refrained from saying anything about my clothes.

Our Iroquois went north before snow flew, and the cabins stood empty, leaves drifting through fire-holes in the bark thatch.

There have been students greedy of knowledge.  I seemed hollow with the fasting of a lifetime.  My master at first tried to bind me to times; he had never encountered so boundless an appetite.  As soon as I woke in the morning I reached for a book, and as days became darker, for tinder to light a candle.  I studied incessantly, dashing out at intervals to lake or woods, and returning after wild activity, with increased zest to the printed world.  My mind appeared to resume a faculty it had suspended, and to resume with incredible power.  Magnetized by books, I cared for nothing else.  That first winter I gained hold on English and Latin, on French reading, mathematics, geography, and history.  My master was an Oxford man, and when roused from dawdling, a scholar.  He grew foolishly proud and fond of what he called my prodigious advance.

De Chaumont’s library was a luscious field, and Doctor Chantry was permitted to turn me loose in it, so that the books were almost like my own.  I carried them around hid in my breast; my coat-skirts were weighted with books.  There were Plutarch’s Lives in the old French of Amyot, over which I labored; a French translation of Homer; Corneille’s tragedies; Rochefoucauld; Montaigne’s essays, in ten volumes; Thomson’s poems, and Chesterfield’s letters, in English; the life of Petrarch; three volumes of Montesquieu’s works; and a Bible; which I found greatly to my taste.  It was a wide and catholic taste.

De Chaumont spent nearly all that autumn and winter in Castorland, where he was building his new manor and founding his settlement called Le Rayville.  As soon as I became a member of his household his patriarchal kindness was extended to me, though he regarded me simply as an ambitious half-breed.

The strong place which he had built for his first holding in the wilderness thus grew into a cloistered school for me.  It has vanished from the spot where it stood, but I shall forever see it between lake and forest.