For has not this woman, during the first year of her married life, ground from one to two thousand pounds of corn meal in payment for her man and her wedding dress? She has, indeed. And since she has purchased him, she has the right to divorce him. He may slave in the hot fields and the sand-blows, running to and from the patches, hoe on shoulder, to charm a crop of corn. He has planted with ceremony—so many grains for the hot wind, so many for the field rat, so many for the katchina, and so many for himself; but once he has harvested it, and packed the Hopi share to the home cellar, his ponies may starve for the lack of a hatful of grain if his wife is not generous. One thing with another, I think the Hopi male has a rather tough time of it. Sometimes he grows a bit fretful and proceeds to push his wife about, rarely going so far as to box her jaws, which she very often thoroughly deserves and earns. Then, if she still likes him, she appeals amid tears to the Agent, with view to having him reprimanded and, unless it be crop-time, jailed. But if she does not care for him overmuch, having, as related of an Ethiopian matron, “entirely lost her taste for that man,” she abruptly divorces him. This action calls for no assemblage of the family circle or of chieftains, no personal complaint, no service of notice, as one might imagine. Friend husband returns at evening from the sheep-camp or cornfield, probably crooning an old kiva hymn, at peace with all the Desert and its demons, to find his saddlegear, his cow-rope, and his other shirt on the doorstep. The decree is thus handed down, recorded, and confirmed. There is no appeal. He is out. He hoists his few belongings on his back and departs away from there. If a young man, he will likely return to the parental roof; if not, he becomes a solitary and a wanderer for a season, roosting about where nightfall catches him, to be found later in company with some divorced woman or widow, cheerfully toiling to harvest corn for children not his own. When this thing has been repeated a number of times, and throughout a whole tribe, the Agent’s job of keeping vital statistics of clarity begins to loom into proportions. A Hopi genealogical record resembles a war-map. The keeping of it becomes abstract science, having both biological and anthropological phases. I have known Hopi men of middle age who long maintained a fatherly interest in their children after such a social cataclysm; but they were not many, most of them growing careless of any and all responsibility; and I have found women as the heads of households to which—to adjust the records—I had to assign four husbands, all living and none present.