"You would enjoy seeing how quickly the girls in our Home learn to help each other. Mercedes had been in the Home but ten days when Francesca came--a bit of a waif who had never worn shoes in all her life, nor seen a bed before. Of course she knew nothing about undressing and sleeping between clean, white sheets. She tried to do like the others, but got into bed with her precious new shoes and stockings on. Mercedes watched her, and when ready herself, slipped across the room, whispered to Francesca, took off her shoes and stockings, pushed her--but very gently--down on her knees for the evening prayer, and then covered her up in bed as softly and lovingly as a mother." [Footnote: In Southern Seas--Alice M. Guernsey--Women's Home Missionary Society, Methodist Episcopal Church.] * * * * * With soft, Insistent regularity came the beat of the tom-tom over the hills, calling the Indians to the Medicine Lodge dance. There was something weirdly fascinating in the reiterated turn, turn, that carried almost a hypnotic power as hour after hour it called through the stillness. Wrapped in their bright blankets--men on horseback--whole families in wagons--the Indians passed round the curve of the road, to disappear in the big, open depression just beyond, where the Medicine Lodge was in camp. There was a group of rounded tents in which families and guests were prepared to live the four days and nights during which the rites of the dance lasted. It was an untidy and disorderly camp, with children and dogs tumbling about--women kneeling to arrange small strips of meat to cook over the bit of wood fire on the ground, or attending to other home-keeping matters. Dirt, flies, children, and dogs were everywhere. A few feet away stretched the long tent where the ceremony of the dance was to take place. They had taken their places and were ready for the ceremony--mostly men, a few women, a little girl of nine years, a young mother of twenty whose baby two weeks old was held by an aged grandmother, who crouched at the end. All were dressed in beaded finery. All wore moccasins--some men had long beaded stoles--others wonderful beaded waistcoats. The women wore long beaded hair ornaments reaching almost to the ground, as well as strings of beads and other ornaments. The faces of nearly all were marked with spots of bright red or long streaks of yellow and red. The same color was used in the parting of the hair. They sat on the ground in two long rows, facing each other; back of each, attached to the wood trellis of the tent, hung fur pouches of various shapes and sizes, ornamented with beads and containing the "medicine," which was some trifling article--a bit of bone, stone, seed, or whatever, through some special circumstance, had come to be accepted by them as their charm, or "medicine," to ward off sickness and evil--to bring them the good offices and protection of the good spirits.