Comes also to the Agent a telegram from the Commissioner: HOPE YOU ARE DOING NOTHING TO ENCOURAGE HOPI SNAKE DANCE—just that. Already advertising or lurid press-stories have announced the date in Washington. The somnolent Bureau, that so often finds it inexpedient to administer justice, arouses itself and heaves the telegram over three thousand miles. Never shall it be said that the joys of the savage should receive sympathetic understanding. By no means permit them to be happy in their way. Teach them to be happy in our way. Encourage that broad spirit of charity we invite from Kansas via the Civil Service examinations. But do these things without hurting the native’s feelings. Never act so as to arouse or even risk antagonism. “Do nothing to encourage the Snake Dance,” but remember, if you have an urge to discourage it, that we have not directed you to do anything. We have simply expressed the hope that you will successfully do nothing. And the Agent, whoever he may be, has just finished wrestling with the last of his fiscal-year accounts, closing June thirtieth and requiring all of July to assemble. He has signed 7863 papers of different colors and symbols, all explaining his honesty. He has completed one thousand calculations forming the statistical section of his Annual Report, long arrays of figures, giving the exact value of each washtub, proving the altitude and longitude of everything, from the number of sheep the Indians devour in a year and why, to the number of tacks used in fixing the linoleum to his kitchen floor. He will have recently emerged from the impotent phrases of his narrative Report, a mandatory composition of past woes and future griefs, destined to fill an Eastern pigeonhole. These things are fetishes, thieves of time and destroyers of efficiency, worshiped by the Bureau as the documentary reason for its existence. Like prefaces, they are hopefully prepared, but seldom read, and certainly never acted on. The Agent will pause long enough to sign a permit—a colored slip of paper printed over with regulations having a local significance. Read them; for he will not have time to read them to you. He has had them printed for a purpose—the purpose of relieving him of explanations. Should the Agent appear a trifle acrid in manner, have patience. He may have just opened a batch of exceptions to his last year’s accounts, rebuking him many times for intelligently carrying on the business of the Government, when absence of intelligence would have been much cheaper and approved. Or he may have received one of those Departmental questionnaires, calculated on the abacus of economy, and propounding solemnly something like this:—