" It was a
tremendous lesson for Jan, but he struggled with it manfully, and a
week after his arrival, when one evening he was tuning his violin to
play for young MacDonald, he said with eager gravity:
"Ah, I have it now, Mr. MacDonald. It ees not 'EES,' it ees 'EES!'"
MacDonald roared, but persisted, and in time Jan began to get the
twist out of his tongue.
The school opened in November, and Jan found himself one of twenty or
so, gathered there from forty thousand square miles of wilderness. Two
white youths and a half-breed had come from the Etawney; the factor at
Nelson House sent up his son, and from the upper waters of the Little
Churchill there came three others.
From the first, Jan's music found him a premier place in the interest
of the tutor sent over by the company. He studied by night as well as
by day, and by the end of the second month his only competitor was the
youth from Nelson House. His greatest source of knowledge was not the
teacher, but MacDonald. There was in him no inherent desire for the
learning of the people to the south. That he was storing away, like a
faithful machine, for the use of Melisse. But MacDonald gave him that
for which his soul longed--a picture of life as it existed in the
wonderful world beyond the wilderness, to which some strange spirit
within him, growing stronger as the weeks and months passed, seemed
projecting his hopes and his ambitions.
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