Atherly's unaffected and unobtrusive zeal, his fixity of purpose,
his undoubted courage, his self-abnegation, and above all the gentle
melancholy and half-philosophical wisdom of this new missionary, won
him the respect and assistance of even the most callous or the most
skeptical of officials. The Secretary of the Interior had given him
carte blanche; the President trusted him, and it was said had granted
him extraordinary powers. Oddly enough it was only his own Californian
constituency, who had once laughed at what they deemed his early
aristocratic pretensions, who now found fault with his democratic
philanthropy. That a man who had been so well received in England--the
news of his visit to Ashley Grange had been duly recorded--should sink
so low as "to take up with the Injins" of his own country galled their
republican pride. A few of his personal friends regretted that he had
not brought back from England more conservative and fashionable graces,
and had not improved his opportunities. Unfortunately there was no
essentially English policy of trusting aborigines that they knew of.
In his gloomy self-scrutiny he had often wondered if he ought not to
openly proclaim his kinship with the despised race, but he was always
deterred by the thought of his sister and her husband, as well as by the
persistent doubt whether his advocacy of Indian rights with his fellow
countrymen would be as well served by such a course. And here again he
was perplexed by a singular incident of his early missionary efforts
which he had at first treated with cold surprise, but to which later
reflection had given a new significance. After Gray Eagle's revelation
he had made a pilgrimage to the Indian country to verify the statements
regarding his dead father,--the Indian chief Silver Cloud. Despite
the confusion of tribal dialects he was amazed to find that the Indian
tongue came back to him almost as a forgotten boyish memory, so that
he was soon able to do without an interpreter; but not until that
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