The Middle Five: Indian Boys at School

Vacation had come, and the Indians were about to start on their annual summer buffalo hunt. Some of the scholars were to accompany their parents, and others, after a brief home...

The small boys had been marched to bed at eight o'clock. We, the Middle Five, who, for the first time, were permitted to stay up until ten,--a privilege hitherto enjoyed only by...

"Brush! Brush! Brush!" I ran calling one morning soon after breakfast, down to the barn, to the spring, and back to the house, but I could not find the boy; then I thrust my fin...

He stood on the third board of the fence from the ground, and leaned with his elbows on the top one, now and again kicking with his moccasined foot a loose panel. How long he ha...

"Keep still, now, keep still! You have a big stick in your toe, and I must take it out. If you keep pulling like that, I might run the point of this awl into your foot."

"Frank, you're learning fast!" said Brush one afternoon as I was laboriously writing my lesson on a slate with his help. "I'm glad; I want you to catch up with me so we can be i...

In one of the little houses of the village of the "Make-believe White-men" there sat on the floor of the room, which served as parlor, kitchen, dining, and bedroom, a man and a...

It was recess. The laughter and shouts of the boys, as they chased each other and wrestled, mingled with the song of the wren and other birds that inhabited the woods surroundin...

Leaning against the wall of a large stone building, with moccasined feet dangling from a high wooden bench on the front porch, sat a little boy crying. His buckskin suit, pretti...

The hands of the little clock on Gray-beard's desk indicated the hour of two. The midsummer's sun hurled its rays with unrelenting force to the earth, and the wind, as though co...

It was Saturday, a day of delight for the boys and girls of the Mission school, for to them it was a day of rest from the toil of study, and a visit home was permitted. On this...

Brush was a genius as a whittler. He had only one tool, and that was a rusty jack-knife with a single broken blade, and that blade was kept sharp almost to the keenness of a raz...

It was a hot September afternoon; our gingham handkerchiefs, which matched our shirts, were wet with mopping our faces. We all felt cross; Gray-beard was cross, and everything w...

"Third Reader," called Gray-beard, and some ten or twelve boys and girls marched to the place of recitation, and put their toes on a straight crack in the floor. The reading les...

We scrambled out of bed and rushed to the windows. Sure enough, there was snow on the ground, and the trees that the frost had stripped of their verdant beauty now stood resplen...

The afternoon session was over; Gray-beard tapped his bell; we put away our books, folded our arms, and when there was silence the teacher spoke: "Frank will remain here until h...