It was a shock to discover that she, that most well built girl, so discrete, so comely, so able a thing in appearance, should be so stupid. There are things that she cannot learn. She will never finish school. Positively stupid. Why her little brother, no bigger than Hop o' my Thumb has caught up to her and will soon outstrip her. Her older brother is the brightest boy in the High School. She will I suppose breed stupid children. Plant wizards choose the best out of lots running into the millions. Choose here there everywhere for hybrids. A ten-pound white leghorn cockerel, hens that lay eggs big enough to spoil the career of any actor. She might though have bright children. What a pity that one so likely should be so stupid. Easier to work with but I should hate a child of mine to be that way. Excuses--Try first. Argue after. Excuses. Do not dare. There sat the seven boys--nine years old and there-abouts--planning dire tortures for any that should seduce or touch in any way their sisters. Each strove to exceed the other. Tying his antagonist to a tree Apollo took out his knife and flayed him. For sweet as the flute had been yet no man can play the flute and sing at the same time. But the God had first played his harp and then sung to his own accompaniment--a thing manifestly unfair. No doubt, his sense of being in the wrong whetted his lust for the other's hide. In any case he got what he was after. He was the winner and that was all there was about it. Each boy would think with a secret glow of a new torture: I would dip his hands in boiling lead--they often melted old pieces of lead in a plumber's pot over a field fire to make slugs for their bean shooters--then I would tie a rope to his feet and drag him on cinders etc.... each inventing a worse torture than that pictured before. And all for their sisters' virtue. So there under the east wall of the Episcopal Church they sat in a group on the grass and talked together for an hour. The real empire builders of our colonial period were not the statesmen, the men of wealth, the great planters but the unknown pioneers who fought single-handed and at once both the primeval wilderness and the lurking savage. The hand crooked to the ploughtail was shaped to the trigger. The Mesa Verde cliff dwellers--a much advanced race--formed a partnership with nature in the science of home building. Masterpieces of architecture, the survivals of the cliff dwellings tell the story of the ages. On the top of a point high above the steep cliffs stood Sun Temple, so called, scene of the great ceremonial dramas of the clan. The building is in the form of the letter D and many of the stones which make up the thousand-odd feet of walls are highly decorated. The corner stone of the building contains a fossil leaf of a palm tree. Influenced by anything which even in shape resembled the sun, the primitive people walled in the leaf on three sides and made a shrine.