The chief feature attracting popular interest to the Hopi is the number and remarkable character of their ceremonies. These "dances," as they are usually called, seem to be going on with little intermission. Every Hopi is touched by some one of the numerous ceremonies and nearly every able-bodied inhabitant of the seven towns takes an active part during the year. This keeps the Hopi out of mischief and gives them a good reputation for minding their own business, besides furnishing them with the best round of free theatrical entertainments enjoyed by any people in the world, for nearly every ceremony has its diverting as well as its serious side, for religion and the drama are here united as in primitive times. The Hopi live and move and have their being in religion. They have peopled the unseen world with a host of beings, and they view all nature as full of life. The sun, moon, stars, rocks, winds, rain, and rivers are members of the Hopi pantheon to be reckoned with in their complicated worship. Every moon brings its ceremony, and the cycle of the different "dances" is completed in perhaps four years; a few dances indeed may have even longer intervals, but these dances do not seem to fall in the calendar and are held whenever decided upon by the proper chief. Some of the dances alternate also, the Snake Dance, for instance, being held one year and the Flute Dance the following year. For half the year, from August to January, the actors in the ceremonies wear masks, while for the remainder of the year the dancers appear unmasked; and as every ceremony has its particular costumes, ritual, and songs, there is great variety for the looker-on in Tusayan. So many are the ceremonies, which differ more or less in the different villages, and so overwhelming is the immemorial detail of their performance, that one might well despair of recording them, much less of finding out a tithe of their meaning. There is grouped around these dances the lore of clans in the bygone centuries, innumerable songs and prayers and rites gathered up here and there in the weary march, strewn with shells of old towns of the forgotten days. No fear that this inexhaustible mine will be delved out by investigators before it disappears utterly; the wonder is that it has survived so long into this prosaic age of anti-fable. We have here the most complete Freemasonry in the world, which, if preserved, would form an important chapter in the history of human cults, and in the opinion of enlightened men, it should have a record before the march of civilization treads it in the dust.