Next in the Hopi life-calendar appears the urgent necessity for marriage. The happy man has very little to do with this affair. The bride-elect—self-elected—and her mother, a wily dowager who has contrived a large part of the proceedings, decide most of these things for themselves. I cannot say how early negotiations have been opened by the aunts and uncles of both signatories, but of course they have been consulted. At any rate, on a day the girl and her mother pay a visit to the eligible young man’s home, and tender his parents a present of piki bread and cornmeal on a woven-reed plaque. Most Southwest tribes use a wedding-basket symbol; the Navajo import from another tribe a wedding basket of definite design, and will use no other. If the boy’s parents accept these presents and replace them with a portion of mutton on the same plaque, they have signified their consent to the union. If there has been dissension between the Montagues and Capulets and a plague on both houses, so to speak, the disdaining parents give this piki and meal to others, signifying their lack of interest in mere foreigners, and these receiving diplomats break the sad news that a perfectly good offer has been declined. But if the present is accepted, the uncles of the bride-elect gather at her home to advise her concerning the duties of a good wife, and at an appointed time the girl, accompanied by her parents and close relatives, headed by the one who named her, proceed to the home of the groom’s parents for a feast. This gathering is held at night, and when they depart the bride remains. She spends four nights in her husband’s people’s home, doing the housework for the whole family. Very early in the morning she begins the corn-grinding, to pay for her husband. During these four days there is a ceremony of hair-washing, and her hair is given a peculiar cut to mark her as a married woman. Ever after she wears it so. And during these four days the boy’s uncles bring in cotton for her wedding-robe. They are paid for it in meal, and they depart to the kiva to weave it. While at this weaving, they are fed by the girl’s family. At the end of the four days the robe is finished. The uncles heap a wealth of advice on the groom before he departs from the home of his birth. Then the bride dons the white robe and goes with her husband to the home of her own parents; that is to say, she is accompanied by her husband. If he has had any ideas of a home of his own, away from the precincts of mother-in-law, he has not announced them, and apparently discretion is the better part of valor. In this manner a young lady has gone to the home of a desirable young man, proposed for him, married him, partially paid for him, decked herself with apparel manufactured by his people, and then led him to her home in triumph. There is nothing new under the sun. Vamping was reduced to a precise science by the Hopi many centuries before the pueblo de Los Angeles was dreamed of.