are as good as a similar average of whites anywhere. The wise purpose is to make them kind, moral, educated and industrious Indians, not make-believe white men, and the work is doing and promising well in sincere and capable hands. The Indian Fourth-of-July celebration took place in an open, treeless prairie. The festivities centred in a series of races run in pairs by the small and wiry Indian ponies over a curved, mowed and rolled half-mile course. Nearly all the young men were betters, in stakes of from twenty-five cents to ten dollars. There were no pools, but hard running, straight betting and square paying. The chief of police was the president of the course. All were in good-humor. There was no liquor, neither was there a harsh word or a blow among the five hundred. After the races eatables, tea, coffee and ice-water were enjoyed with laughter and chat. In the evening we cruisers gave a show of rockets and Roman candles, to the great delight of the Indians, and the day closed with a dance in the large dining-hall of the boarding-school. [Illustration: ACROSS THE PRAIRIE.] Our damaged boats repaired and preparations completed for three weeks' absence from civilization, we set out near mid-day of Saturday for the march to Wild Rice River, eighteen miles. Our way lay among the cabins, lodges and farms of the Chippewas, over a billowy, green immensity bordered on the east by the lines of the Hauteur des Terres, which shut us from the Mississippi Valley, and horizoned on the west by the slopes beyond the famed Red River of the North. Our day's journey terminated, in a driving rainstorm, on the banks of Wild Rice River, where are a trading-store, the cabin of the trader and a neat chapel of the Protestant Episcopal mission. Our habitation for the night was a dark, muddy, odorous storehouse, in whose nether apartment we munched a frugal supper, then climbed a ladder to beds upon the bare floor between stacks of snake-root, which had accumulated from barterings with the Indians. During the night the rainstorm grew to a gale which rocked our night's home like a ship at sea to the music of heaven's grand diapasons. Sunday morning, impelled by the expense of our large retinue and the cheerlessness of our refuge, we pushed on for the foot of Wild Rice Lake, twenty miles distant over prairies and through forests. Two miles out we were overtaken by another fierce storm, which drove us to the shelter of the last human habitation, save two others near by, that we should see for three weeks. The broad, sweeping bow of the black cloud, the peculiar detonations of thunder in that clear atmosphere, the rush of wind, rain and hail, unhindered by the treeless and trackless moor, were lessons of God's majesty and power more impressive than cathedral mass or prayer and song and psalm of men. Out of the storm's first onset we rushed unasked into the hut of an Indian family, and surprised a pair of squaws and a six-months' pappoose squatting on a dirty and