Before he came to me I had another half-breed for two years, and before that there had been a series of full-blooded native boys. I found the half-breed greatly preferable. With full command of the native language, with such insight into the native mind as few white men ever attain, he combines the white man's quickness of apprehension and desire for knowledge; and the companionship had been pleasant and profitable. Both these boys had picked up quickly and efficiently, without the slightest previous experience, the running and the care of the four-cylinder gasoline engine of the mission launch, and took a great and intelligent interest in all machinery. As an interpreter the half-breed is far superior to most full-bloods; he takes one's purport immediately; his mind seems to leap with the speaker's mind, not only to follow faithfully but to anticipate. And the further his English progresses, so much the more excellent interpreter does he become. My heart goes out to the large and rapidly increasing number of these youths of mixed blood in Alaska. It is common to hear them spoken of slightingly and contemptuously. There is what my mind always regards as a damnable epigram current in the country to the effect that the half-breed inherits the vices of both races and the virtues of neither. The white man who utters this saying with a chuckle at his second-hand wit has generally not much virtue to transmit, were virtue heritable. But to thoughtful men nowadays this talk of the inheritance of virtues and vices is mere folly. The half-breed in Alaska, as elsewhere, is the product of his environment. Often without legitimate father--although in an Indian community, where nothing is secret, his parentage is usually well known--he is left for some native woman to support with the aid of her native husband. He is reared with the full-blooded offspring of the couple in the frankness that knows no reserve and the intimacy that knows no restraint, of Indian life. The full extent of that frankness and intimacy shocks even the loosest-living white man when he first becomes aware of it. Where religion and decency have not been faithfully inculcated there is no bound to it at all--it is complete. Presently, as his superior intellectual inheritance begins to manifest itself, as he grows up into consciousness that he is different from, and in many ways superior to, the Indians around him, he is naturally drawn to such white society as comes his way. [Sidenote: THE LOW-DOWN WHITE]