But to return to the Hopi wedding. After the four days spent in the home of her husband’s people, and her triumphant return with the captive to the house of her mother, the bride is supposed to deny herself the pleasure of all Hopi revelry and ceremony until the next Neman Katchina Dance. This occurs about a fortnight prior to the Snake Dance of August, and is an appeal for rain and harvest fruition. Then she arrays herself once more in the pure white robe, and appears for a few moments at the ceremony. This is to be her last bid for public attention and the bride’s centre of the stage, before settling down to a life of toil certainly, the rearing of many children probably, and perhaps a number of alliances. But it matters not how troubled her life, how peaceful, pure, how hectic; this first marriage is the only one to be distinguished by a ceremony and a symbol. This is the last time she wears the robe—save one. When next we see her in its white folds, she, having fulfilled the monotonous duties of a true Hopi or having, like Emma Bovary, tested all of life’s experiences, is waiting, peacefully uncaring, to be carried to her last bed in the shadow of the great, immutable mesa. My introduction to the importance of the wedding robe came about through an effort to eliminate the evil power of the tribe’s old women. The weddings were arranged entirely too early, and operated to defy both Arizona State Law and Service regulation. It was a foxy method and held to with savage determination. An appeal to the Bureau would have brought only the hopeless decision that a tribal marriage had been declared a legal marriage by great Eastern Solons bent on pushing Orientals into Occidental grooves. Often too, young people were forced into these marriages. And the results were highly pleasing to the Hopi elders, and four-fold: Rachel’s mother procured labor in the form of Jacob. Jacob’s family received the ton of corn meal that Rachel would grind. Certainly Rachel, and often both contracting parties, were prevented from attending the schools, as the old Hopi earnestly desired; and Hopi traditions as to fruition were completely satisfied. There was an even more serious result. This grinding of corn meal early and late, crouched over the stone metate, ended in the young mother’s losing her first-born. At one time there was no Hopi woman at the First Mesa whose first-born child was living. So, as Moungwi, I gave them fair warning that these things must stop. They did not stop. An Indian, of whatever tribe, will always chance a test. They are a great people for stolid experiments. My first idea of punishment was, the child-wife to the boarding-school, the groom and his father to the Agency jail. “But,” these male unfortunates finally convinced me, “you are punishing the wrong persons. We men have had nothing to do with the matter. Get the old women.”