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Perhaps it would not be amiss if we paused now and again in our mad and silly whirl, to deliver a Message. So let us direct this to the Youth in the schoolroom, and especially the ones looking through the windows and to the world beyond, and with something like impatience.

Stick to the books, kiddies. Might be glad you did some day.

Archie Isaacs is a Snohomish Indian. He is 75, and oh, dear, might as well splurt this right out and get it over with.

He had looked upon the red, red wine. He was in the bucket when we talked to him.

Isaacs started grade school at Snohomish, and wound it up at Cushman Indian School, near Tacoma, he told us. He was quite bright in school, and because of it he won a scholarship at Highland Park Military Academy, Chicago.

That was in 1893, and the year of the Chicago World Fair. So it was decided that Isaacs should go on the great iron horse with (the late) Indian Agent Edw. L. Chalcraft, who was taking his wife and small son to the exposition.

We might add for no reason at all - that the Chalcraft boy was then called by his middle name, "Pickering," perhaps because he was but two, and with little command of languages or strength for defense.

That he grew up to be known as E. P. Chalcraft, and one of the Pee Eye's reporters.

"I did fairly well at Highland Park," Isaacs said, and we can only believe that Indians might be given to understatement too. For when we pressed we learned that he did four years of high school in three, and that his general grade average was 96.33.

That this noble score earned him an invite to Dartmouth.

"I went there in the fall of '96," Isaacs said. "There were 164 in the freshman class, and only 900 students all told. It was football season, of course, but I don't remember that they had much of a team.

"I do recall that they did beat somebody, Williams or Bowdoin or Amherst, maybe. That they routed us out, and that we had to go chasing down to Hanover in our night clothes to meet the train."

Isaacs shivered at the memory. "Oh, well, in Rome, do as the Romans," he said.

"My, no, I wouldn't say that I was an outstanding student. I did win the class gold medal for declamation, though."

Isaac's favorite and prize declamation, he said, was an opus entitled "Benedict Arnold."

The scene opened in a tacky room, and Benedict Arnold on his death-bed. And pres ently the door opens and a preacher appears, the last and only man to see him away to Valhalla.

"It was a powerful thing," Isaacs said, "Benedict Arnold's last words were:

" 'Here I die like a dog, and George Washington is President of the United States."'

Did he deliver these words in a manner to bring the house down? Isaacs shrugged his shoulders.

"I was exposed to a little Latin," he said, by way of changing the subject. "French. Math. The usual college stuff."

Isaacs did not stay for his degree. "Homesick," he said.

Isaacs went to work in the woods when he returned. He became a hook-tender, and occasionally a foreman. And then he was too old for any of it.

"I do what I can," Isaacs said. "The berry fields, or harvesting the beets. I suppose I SHOULD put in for an old-age pension, that's what my friends keep telling me.

"I suppose that I was faced with the big decision when I first came home. They were paying pretty good money in the woods, and heck, I didn't feel that I could afford a genteel occupation.

"Never did find use for much of anything I learned in college. You couldn't give with Benedict Arnold on a cold winter night in a bunkhouse - they'd have tossed you out in the snow.

"Never met a logger who wanted to know about the Helvetians, or cared that Gaul was divided into three parts.

"No, sir, I never thought my college did me any good until the other day."

Dear old Dartmouth, we learned, and we are happy to pass the fact along, loves to be informed on its departed sons.

So a prominent local grad was put on the trail of Archie Isaacs and he found him right where we found him.

"I wanted to go over to pick apples," Isaacs said. "He fixed it up to get me sprung, and I'm leaving for Wenatchee tomorrow.

"I guess you never can tell when an education's going to come in handy," he saidhappily.

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