W YOUNG PEOPLE OF THE PRAIRIE HEN Mr. Jorgensen and I The front door of the dormitory was locked, and we had to troop down through a side door into the basement. Here I received my first impression of Thrall Academy. The dining room was large, with cement walls and floor, and there was a small kitchen. Within two months we expected to take care of from 20 to 30 students. And what a place! Mud all over the floor where it had rained in or been tracked in; no shades or curtains at the mud-spattered windows. In the dining room there was a long, rough pine table, rudely constructed. There were two benches to match, without backs and none too solid on their legs. In the kitchen we found a rusty old stove, a few roughly-built shelves, a small cupboard, a work table built of lumber, about a dozen misfit cups and plates, a half dozen pots and pans, and a worn-out broom. No kitchen range, no lamps, no chairs, no laundry articles not so much as a kitchen dipper. Upstairs we went, and I must confess that the higher we went the lower my heart sank. No curtains, no floor covering, no furniture any where, except an iron bedstead and three chairs left by the former set of students. How was it possible, I thought, to ever make a comfortable eating establishment and girls' dormitory out of the place. The walls were unfinished, except in the two front rooms on the first floor, and there were places around the windows where I could nearly thrust my fingers out of doors. Was the other building the school building-like this, I asked. Mr. Jorgensen smiled grimly. "Worse," he said, "we'll go out and see it after awhile." I could not see that it was any worse, but neither was it any better. And when we inquired as to possible resources, we found that there was no money with which to buy anything, and there was no lumber lying around with which to build anything better. The recitation rooms had no seats or desks or tables. There were no blackboards, except a square yard of black oilcloth in each room. In the main room there were two old store counters and a couple of long benches. Three rusty, broken stoves and a piano, out of tune, but otherwise promising, made up the remaining quota of school equipment. Besides the two large buildings, we found a horse shed, a small coal house, and a well. In buildings like this, then, we must camp, with such bedding and utensils as we had brought in our car, until our household goods arrived at Hettinger and could be brought the fifty-five miles by wagon. freight. When they came, they had been through three heavy rains without covering, and we began the disheartening task of drying out bedding and rugs, and moving in furniture whose glue had sprung at every joint and whose varnish was gone but not forgotten. But we were here. The country was lovely, and after the rains stopped, the air was fine. We got acquainted with the large family of prairie dogs in the front yard, explored the bare section of land that belonged to the Academy, sent for our chickens, bought us a cow, took two three-day-old pigs to raise by hand, watched the ever-changing beauty of the Slim Buttes, fifteen miles away to the west, accepted two small kittens from a benevolent neighbor, went seventeen miles to a meeting of the Ladies' Aid in order to get acquainted with our people, where, and wallboard should be put on the rough walls, if we could manage to get hold of any money. What we actually accomplished before school opened was little enough, but when we considered that we had not had one cent to work with, we congratulated ourselves. We sent a request to the church at Onawa for a barrel of dishes-any dishes that we could set a table with. They sent us new dishes, enough to set tables for forty GIRLS' DORMITORY, THRALL ACADEMY eight people. The church at Sioux Falls wrote asking what they could do. We told them what we needed, and received a shipment of furniture and rugs and kitchen articles. We bought a range for the kitchen with our own money, intending to get it back later if there was any. I filled in as seemed to be necessary from my own supply, for it turned out that I had more than there was room for in my house. When the school opened, we had no cook, owing to the fact that the one we had hired at the munificent sum of five dollars a week backed out at and shortly felt that we were a part the last minute. I can't say that I of the country. The next two months were busy ones. We must buy a shack and move it on the place before school began. Otherwise we would have no place to live, for the school buildings are too small for the students alone, without a large and thriving family like ours. The store counters must be taken to pieces and built into a study table and more benches. Some kind of a dining room and kitchen outfit must be found some blamed her. We had no matron. We owed the old matron a large part of her year's salary and we did not wish to pile new obligations on old debts. We laid in a small supply of groceries on our own account. I assumed the duties of cook, matron, teacher, and preacher, as well as those which go with the care of five children, three gold fish, two kittens, a puppy, and two pigs. Mr. Jorgensen took up the task of teaching five days a week, foraging on Saturdays, and preaching at seven widely-separated points on Sunday. The other two teachers arrived, the students came with beds and bedding, and school began. As I look back, it seems almost amazing that things went so well. Such times as we had doing the things that must be done and putting all the rest off until to-morrow. By and by, we found a cook, who is with us yet, a good, faithful Norwegian woman, who never fails to get three wholesome, simple, inexpensive meals on the table in good time every day. We still lack a matron because we can not pay her. If some one with means were to ask me what could be done for Thrall Academy that would most help to form the character of the students, I the students, I would say without a moment's hesitation: "Send me a good, wholesouled, motherly woman to be a second mother to all these students, away from home for the first time, often homesick and lonely, in need of advice and training, and helpless without some one to oversee their daily living." Aside from the matter of a matron, the personnel of the school is fairly complete. Mr. Jorgensen and I happen to have studied along different lines, he in languages and I in English. We have Miss Jamison for the music and Latin, and Mr. Ward, the youngest son of Joseph Ward, founder of Yankton College, has the mathematics and science work. Let me sum up just what was accomplished that first year. It looks small enough, perhaps, but to us who felt the full weight of the burden, it seemed well worth getting done. We never could have accomplished anything but for the help from outside. The people around gave as they could of what they had. They sent in vegetables throughout the year, so we bought almost nothing of that kind. They moved our house, and in the spring they came and plowed and planted twenty acres of the Academy quarter section. Then we had a Then we had a grant from the Education Society to help pay salaries. And one by one, now here and now there, now a church and now an individual, sent such help as they could in the way of boxes of books, bedding, lamps, rugs, an occasional gift of money, or a bundle of magazines. In this way we received a large stove for the assembly room, and lately, a reservoir for the kitchen range, and fifty new school desks-this last last a gift from the church at Mitchella pump for the well, several barrels of canned fruit, and so on. All this taken together has made. it possible to bring the school to a point where it may be said to be in running order. Not that we have got a good start, but we are getting things done that were in the minds of the men who founded the Academy. They saw around them a great country rapidly filling up with people-all sorts of people, good and bad, religious and irreligious, lawabiding and law-breaking, rich and poor, foreign and native-all coming here to build homes and develop a community life out of the materials they found at hand. They found no churches and no schools other than the country schools. At what is nearly the center of this rapidly-developing country, a few earnest men set themselves the task of planting a Congregational school and making it the center of a widening circle of Christian influence. From the first, the financial problem has been almost the only trying phase of the work. Good teachers can be found for a really worth-while job. Students can be had in larger numbers than we can take care of them. The cost of food in this country is as low as in any place of which I have knowledge. But the question of comfortable buildings and adequate school equipment, and the subject of developing our Academy farm so as to make it possible to give work to the number of students who could attend if they had work-these must all wait until we get money for them. This money we can not expect to receive from the people here for years to come. Most of them are beginners, plowing thir land, putting up small temporary buildings, and unable, many of them, to pay even the yearly expenses of their children at the Academy. And we keep the expenses of a student down to less than one hundred dollars a year. The people are interested in the Academy, and are eager for an education. They beg for a chance to earn their way, but they have no money to give. They come in ever-increasing numbers, earnest, high-spirited young people. Every nook and cranny is filled with them. The last girl who came found a bed only because two of the older students offered to let her sleep with them, three in a bed, five in a room. We must refuse any further students until we can somehow manage to get more buildings. Where we shall get them we do not know-we who can not afford wallboard to keep the terrible winds out of the shells we call dormitories. We pay our grocery bills by dint of careful management. Coal bills can be met, though we are fervently hoping for a less severe winter than we had last year. Teachers' salaries can be kept somewhere within bounds if the teachers will be satisfied with that. But when this is But when this is done, we come up squarely against a stone wall. We must have buildings, and we must have them at once. We must have farm machinery and farm animals. The things we must have within a year, if the work is not to be crippled and perhaps fail altogether, will cost ten thousand dollars. There is not one-tenth of that in sight, other than money which we must use for actual running expenses. The churches of South Dakota have awakened to their great responsibility and sent the money that helped us through last year. But the country is new and feels the heavy outlay that comes with the developing of schools and homes and churches. It rests with the larger body of Congregationalists to say whether we live or die. Death does not scare us particularly, for if we die some one else will hardly fail to see the need of the country and to find success where we have failed. We are needed here, and that is our main reason for desiring to remain. We plan nothing extravagant in the way of a school plant, but we want to lay to lay foundations foundations broad enough to build for the future. We want good, comfortable dormitories for the probable growth of the next ten years, say up to two hundred students. We want a good school building. We plan barns for twenty cows and a farm outfit large enough to care for them. We want hogs and sheep and cattle to provide meat, poultry, eggs, milk, butter, cheese, vegetables, and fruits, all produced on the place by student labor. We need a windmill and a silo and a farm tractor and a small gasoline engine for grinding feed and cutting silage. We dream of such things as furnaces and laboratories, a welllighted library, a gymnasium, a manual training department, a cooking school, a business course, a model school for our normal students, free text-books, a music room and extra pianos, a dairy, a laundry room, and, how strange but how practical, a brick yard, where we can make of the native clay, with the native lignite coal and the students' labor, the bricks, thousands and thousands, to lay in the walls of solid low-lying buildings that will stand against the arctic hurricanes and the summer heat. These things will not come in a day. There was a time when a cook stove seemed a future hope. We have learned to follow the custom of the country and get along as best we can with what we have. But while this enables us to live comfortably through what would be mortifying to the average family, it doesn't do very well as a working policy for running a school. It must be that God has raised up a man or a group of men to provide for this work. I am sure they are somewhere, ready and eager to help, if they only knew the need. I am not begging. Whoever heard a messenger of the Most High beg? This that I have written is just to let the people know. T LITTLE CHILDREN I HAVE MET HE first time I started on a long Western trip, words like Western trip, words like Northern Wisconsin, Minnesota, Montana, etc., were on the schedule, and I kept one page in my diary for descriptions of "Wild Animals I Have Met." However, I have never really seen one outside of the Zoo from that day to this, but I did see many, many very interesting little children in the parsonages, so interesting that I can not forget them, and they taught me lessons that are worth remembering. "Somewhere There's Fifty Cents" In one mail came a letter, saying "If a little boy with a small express Icart meets you at the depot, do not offer to pay him. He is not there for money. He was there, and he put a bulky dress suit case into the cart, and not only delivered it, but appeared the next morning to escort A HOME MISSIONARY FAMILY both me and my baggage back to the depot. While we were waiting for the train, he told me of a story he had once heard about a woman who lived out among the Indians. A Girl's Bravery In one of the older and larger mining sections of a Western state is a burning mine. It was closed up fifteen years ago after a dreadful accident, and night and day the fumes show that the fires still smoulder. At night a soft red light surrounds the hill, and in the day time one is conscious of a gray haze. Both impart a sense of mystery to the whole region. The parsonage is situated. away from the center of the settlement, and is approched by a footpath which brings one very near the mine. It called for a little more courage than I usually have with me to take the walk alone, but I managed to find a fresh supply, and arrived at the house to discover that the family consisted of the pastor, his wife, a nine-year-old daughter, and a dog. When the time came for us to leave for the neighborhood appointment, the small daughter and the big dog were left behind. Three days and three nights of |