This is the story of a girl who loved to listen to the deep chant of the ocean, to the whisper of the wind in the trees, and to the silence in the heart of the hills. She came to feel that there was a joy and a power in the open--in the big, free, unspoiled haunts of furtive beasts and darting birds--that all the man-made wonders of the world could not give. "If I am so much happier and more alive," she said to herself, "in the days that I spend under the open sky, what must it be like _always_ to live this freer life? Did not the people who lived as Nature's own children in these very woods that I come to as the guest of an hour or a summer, have a wisdom and a strength that our life to-day cannot win?" Again and again the thought came knocking at her heart: "The men whom we call savages, whom we have crowded out of the land they once roamed over freely, must have learned very much in all the hundreds of years that they lived close to Nature. They could teach us a great deal that cannot be found in books." Alice C. Fletcher grew up in a cultured New England home. She had the freedom of a generous library and early learned to feel that great books and wise men were familiar friends. They talked to her kindly and never frightened her by their big words and learned looks. She looked through the veil of words to the living meaning. She was, too, very fond of music. Playing the piano was more than practising an elegant accomplishment--just as reading her books was more than learning lessons. As the books stirred her mind to thinking and wondering, so the music stirred her heart to feeling and dreaming. It often seemed, however, that much that her books and music struggled in vain to bring to her within walls was quite clear when she found herself in the large freedom of Nature's house. The sunshine, the blue sky, and the good, wholesome smell of the brown earth seemed to give a taste of the Spontaneous wisdom breathed by health, Truth breathed by cheerfulness. Once in her reading she came upon the story of the scholar who left Oxford and the paths of learning to follow the ways of the wandering gypsies in order that he might learn the natural wisdom they had won. "Ah," she said to herself, "some day when I am free to live my life in my own way I shall leave my books and go out among the Indians. Our country should know what its first children saw and thought and felt. I shall try to see with their eyes and hear with their ears for a while and I shall discover, in that way, perhaps, a new world--one that will be lost forever when the Red Men are made to adopt all the tricks and manners of civilized life." The time came when she found herself free to realize this dream. "You don't mean to say you are really going to live with the Indians?" her friends exclaimed. "How else can I know them?" she replied quietly. "But to give up every necessary comfort!"