kinsfolk of their mother, with whom the father may also remain, if he is the one left; or he may live with his own people. [Illustration: A KISI IN A RIO GRANDE PUEBLO] An unmarried girl who had died in childbirth on the day of the arrival of Dr. Parsons (from whose monograph this account is taken) was buried without the usual water jar of oblation and hence no broken potsherds were left upon the mound. A feast, however, was prepared, for which a sheep was killed and its pelt offered for sale by her mother. Wafer bread was baked, and a brew of cedar twigs was made on the stove, of which the mother must have partaken, for she was seen going through the usual after-vomiting. It happened to be the first day of the _hoinawe_[24] dance, but none of this household went out to watch it. During the day the girl’s father had brought in a load of wood, and in the evening he took supper with the American guest and invited her to go with him to see the cacique;[25] that being over, she was taken by the father of the dead girl into two houses to see other dances, an evident proof that the period of mourning was at an end. The next day, being the fifth after the death, all the household had their hair washed and they now watched the dances. One of the women who watched had earlier thrown bread to the dancers. A decoction of the tansy-mustard[26] is drunk “to make them forget the dead,” although it was once described to Dr. Parsons at Ácoma as poisonous. A second visit to Ácoma brought some new impressions and confirmed or corrected others. To be where the sun is the only time-piece by day and the Dipper by night, and where no form of trade is nearer than nineteen miles, unless one undertakes to transport the delicate pottery of the women, is certainly a unique experience. Through the day we watched at intervals the marvelously deft and steady fingers of our hostess as she outlined elaborate designs upon some large jars, no two being the same, never hesitating for an instant whether it were the hair-line in parallels on the lip, or the curve of a bird’s wing on the rounded surface, of the jar. A younger woman with her yucca-fibre brush filled in the solid spaces, such, for example, as a lozenge or the wing of a bird, all the colors being previously ground and prepared in shallow dishes from minerals collected by the women themselves. During the day ten such jars were decorated. That night we made our beds on the ground at the foot of the Crag under “crumbling columns grand against the moon” with such protection as we could find from the sand flying before a high wind that blew continuously even after there was no longer any threatening of rain. Dark and heavy clouds threw dramatic shadows on the outstanding towers that rose all about us, taking on grotesque totemic forms, rugged, massive, sculpturesque. If by day the houses seem part of the Crag, by night the entire Peñol takes on even more the aspect of a fortress with outstanding escarpments.