The _Â'dalbeáhya_ (the word has some connection with _âdal_, "hair," and scalp) is the eucharistic body of their supernatural hero teacher, the Sun-boy, and has been known among them almost from the beginning of their existence as a people. According to the myth, which has close parallels in other tribes, a girl was one day playing with some companions when she discovered a porcupine in the branches of a tree. She climbed up to capture it, but as she climbed the tree grew, carrying her with it, until it pierced the arch of the sky into the upper world; here the porcupine took on his proper form as the Son of the Sun; they were married and had a son. Her husband had warned her that, in her excursions in search of berries and roots, she must never go near the plant called _äzón_ (pomme blanche, _Psoralea esculenta_) if its top had been bitten off by a buffalo. Like Eve, or Pandora, she longed to test the prohibition, so one day while digging food plants she took hold of a pomme blanche which a buffalo had already cropped and pulled it up by the root, leaving a hole through which she saw far below the earth, which she had forgotten since the day that she had climbed the tree after the porcupine. Old memories awakened, and full of an intense longing for her former home she took her child and fastening a rope above the hole began letting herself down to the earth. Her husband, returning from the hunt, discovered her absence and the method of her escape, and throwing a stone after her through the hole, before she had reached the end of the rope, struck her upon the head and she fell to the ground dead. The child was uninjured, and after staying some time beside the body of his mother he was found and cared for by Spider Woman, who became a second mother to him. One day in playing he threw upward a gaming wheel, which came down upon his head and cut through his body without killing him, so that instead of one boy there were now twin brothers. After many adventures, in the course of which they rid the world of several destructive monsters, one of the brothers walked into a lake and disappeared forever under its waters, after which the other transformed himself into this "medicine," and gave himself in that shape to the Kiowa, who still preserve it as the pledge and guardian of their national existence. This _â´dalbeáhya_, or, as it is sometimes called, the _tä´lyí-dá-i_, "boy-medicine," is in ten portions, in the keeping of as many priests. Its chief priest is T'ébodal, the oldest man of the tribe, with whom the author once had the opportunity of seeing the pouch in which it is carried, for no man, unless possibly the priest himself, has ever been permitted to open it and look upon the contents. It is kept in a small pouch fringed with numerous scalps, in a special tipi appointed for its residence; it is brought out for use in connection with a sweat-house ceremony as individuals may desire to sacrifice to