Very soon after reaching Bayfield, we found a boat going over to Odanah, which, I understand, is the Ojibwa for town or village, and which is the name by which the mission station on Bad River has long been known. As I entered the boat, Mr. Wheeler introduced me to the Ojibwa men who were to take us over. When I shook hands with one of them, he said, "My father, Mr. Riggs." Was he calling me his father, or was it the Indian? I wondered which, but asked no questions. Two or three days after, I learned that adoption was one of the Ojibwa customs, and that when Mr. Wheeler was a little boy this man lost his boy. He came to the mission and said to the missionary, "My boy is gone; you have a great many boys; let me call this one mine." And so they said he might so call him; and from that time Edward Payson Wheeler became the adopted child of an Ojibwa. Now, after he had been gone ten years, going away a boy and coming back a man, they all seemed to regard him like a son and a brother. It was very interesting for me to see how they all warmed toward him. They came to see him, and wanted him to go to their houses. They all wanted to talk with him; and when we came to leave, they all flocked to the mission to shake hands, and to have a last word and a prayer; and they gave him more _muckoks_ of _manomin_ (wild rice) than he could bring away with him. For four days we were the guests of the boarding-school which is in charge of Rev. Isaac Baird. We became much interested in the school and the teachers--Mrs. Baird, Miss Harriet Newell Phillips, Miss Verbeek, Miss Dougherty, and Miss Walker. Naturally, I should be prejudiced in favor of the Dakotas, but I was obliged to confess that I had not seen anywhere twenty-five boys and girls better-looking and more manly and womanly in their appearance than those Ojibwas. The whole community gave evidence of the good work done by the school in past years--many of the grown folks being able to talk English quite well. But there was one impression that came to me without bidding--it was that civilization had been pressed farther and faster than evangelization. While houses and other improvements attested a great deal of labor expended, the native church is quite small, only now numbering about twenty-eight, and the _metawa_, their sacred heathen dance, was danced while we were there, within a stone's-throw of the church. My spirit was stirred within me, and I said to the members of that native church that they ought so to take up the work of evangelizing their own people in good earnest that the dancing of the _metawa_ thus publicly would become an impossibility.