The Navajo are good workers in silver and are all the time improving in their art. They make spherical beads, bracelets, and rings of several sorts, breast ornaments, decorations for harness and bridle, and many other things out of coins or other silver furnished them. The Navajo excel as weavers of blankets, though they use extremely simple looms. The yarn is home-spun from wool taken off their own flocks; they do, however, buy some yarn ready-made from the white man. Formerly they dyed their yarn with dyes taken from various plants or colored earths, but now they mostly use white men’s dyes. Their blankets are firm and closely woven and shed water finely. They are woven in bright patterns. All the Indians who live near the Navajo like their blankets and pay good prices for them. The Navajo greatly like turquoise beads, but they do not find turquoise on their reservation. For these beads and ornaments they trade their fine blankets, and silverware, and good ponies with the Pueblo Indians who live near the mines of this handsome greenstone. The Navajo are great singers and have many songs; but it is the men who sing and not the women. They have also many interesting stories and curious customs, but we cannot stop to tell about them. The Apaches and Navajo are but two tribes out of the hundreds of American Indian tribes. In another book, _American Indians_, you may read about their manners and customs, their songs and music, their stories and worship. IV. MEXICANS. Though Mexico is our next-door neighbor, life and customs are greatly different there from our own. Three different peoples make up the population. First, are the pure-blood Spaniards, who have been born in the country; second, there are the _Mestizos_, mixed people, partly Indian, partly Spanish; third, are the pure Indians, who now form about five-twelfths of the whole population. From the City of Mexico northward the land belongs chiefly to the mestizos; from the City of Mexico southward Indians prevail.