While the larger periods of time are kept with accuracy, so that the time of beginning the ceremonies varies but little from year to year, the Hopi have poor memories for dates. No one knows his age, and many of these villages seem to live within the shifting horizons of yesterday and tomorrow. The priests, however, keep a record of the ceremonies by adding to their _tiponi_, or palladium of their society, a feather for each celebration. At Zuñi a record of the death of priests of the war society is kept by making scratches on the face of a large rock near a shrine, and by this method a Hopi woman keeps count of the days from the child's birth to the natal ceremony. Ask a Hopi when some event happened, and he will say, "_Pai he sat o_," meaning "some time ago, when my father was a boy"; stress on the word means a longer time, and if the event was long beyond the memory of man, the Indian will almost shake his head off with emphasis. The only notched time-stick is that jealously guarded by the sun priest, and no one knows just how he makes his calculations from it. As for dinner time, the great sun and "the clock inside" attend to that; _dawa yamu_, _dawa nashab_, and _dawa poki_ stand for "sunrise," "noonday," and "sunset." If the Hopi makes an appointment for a special hour, he points to where the sun will be at that time. The seasons are known to him in a general way as the time of the cold or snow, the coming back of the sun (winter solstice), the time of bean or corn planting, the time of green corn, the time of harvest, etc., but there is a calendar marked by the ceremonies held during each month. Perhaps these children of the sun are happier in not being slaves of the second as we have become. Our watches, which they call _dawa_, "the sun," have not bound them to the wheel by whose turning we seem to advance. They are satisfied with the grander procession of the heavenly bodies, and their days fade into happy forgetfulness. An experience of several years ago may here be related in order to show how the clan name of a Hopi is a veritable part of himself and also links him to his clan and the most intimate religious and secular life of the pueblo. There was a jolly crowd of Hopi under the dense shade of a cottonwood on the Little Colorado River one hot day in July. The mound of earth, strewn with chips of flint and potsherds like a buried city on the Euphrates, had yielded its secrets, and the house walls of the ancient town of Homolobi resembled a huge honeycomb on the bluff.