7 The education of a Seton Indian 



this was another world, in which they were so much at home; and 

 I would have to learn about it if I was to survive there. 



So far as any sort of career was concerned the two years I spent 

 at Easton were completely wasted, although I did learn a few 

 things about the rest of the world that lay beyond the shadow of 

 Bald Eagle Mountain. But I remained an undisciplined noncon- 

 formist, incapable of learning many of the graces and determined 

 to find a way of life wherein the kind of shoes you wore and the 

 sort of knot you tied in your tie were of no importance whatever. 



During my second year I corresponded with the artist Fuertes, 

 and at his invitation visited him between terms at his home in 

 Ithaca. At his suggestion I applied for a transfer to Cornell Uni- 

 versity, and landed there in the autumn of 1925. Meanwhile vari- 

 ous difficulties had arisen. My father had died unexpectedly, and 

 there wasn't as much money on hand as we had thought there 

 would be. Mother, who had taken a job at a girls' school near 

 New York, would have seen me through at any cost, but other 

 members of the family could see no future in ornithology worth an 

 actual investment. So after only three months I dropped out. 



In the winter of 1925 I turned my back on everything and set 

 out to see the world. This phase had its beginning in the books of 

 Stevenson, Conrad, and McFee, moved on to the throbbing engine 

 room of a freighter bound for Singapore, and ended more than 

 three years later when I came home with exactly forty-eight cents 

 in my pockets. While I was at it I sailed twice around the world, 

 and got shipwrecked on an island in the Sulu Sea before I was 

 old enough to come back to my home precinct and cast a legal vote. 

 In the process I learned even more of the world that lay beyond 

 Bald Eagle Mountain. 



My brother John, a far more adaptable nonconformist than I, 

 stuck it out at college and eventually graduated. When I came 

 to New York just after the '29 market crash, John still had a job 

 in an advertising agency and from there he moved on to Fortune 

 magazine as one of the original staff. I had come to the city to visit 

 with John and fully intended to study for my third mate's ticket 

 and go back to sea. But in December I met a young lady named 

 Evelyn Sedgwick, who had finished at Julliard and was preparing 



