Barbarous as may be this custom of flagellating, there is devout belief behind it. To the ignorant Mexican stimulated by these annual reminders, it is as if, as is literally true, the torture and anguish had occurred to a neighbor in his home town. The faces of the men and women, even of little children witnessing the penitente rites, showed the reality to them of what to most of us is remote as the legend of Hercules. Faith so beautiful and unusual must command respect no matter what arouses it. Yet in black contrast to it is the political and moral corruption said to accompany this dangerous doctrine of expiation. Being especially saintly because of their endurance test, the penitentes during the rest of the year commit murder, adultery, theft and arson with cheerful abandon. Nobody dares oppose them or revenge their excesses, either from pious veneration, fear, or a knowledge of the uselessness of such a procedure. For the Penitentes are whispered to be potent politically. Membership in the sect is kept secret. Many prominent judges and state politicians are said to be Penitentes. If a fellow member is brought to justice, he gets off lightly or goes scot-free, and strange deaths are predicted for enemies, private or public, of the sect. I was even warned not to write of them, for fear their power should extend beyond the state’s borders. Doubtless much of this local fear is exaggerated. But I predict that what church and legislature have failed to do, the ubiquitous tourist will accomplish. In the more remote hill towns, services still reproduce the incarnadined Passion with all its horrors. Nearer to Santa Fé, the flagellants withdraw closer and closer into their morados. Without an audience to sympathize, pain and torture become less tolerable. No man, however sincere he believes himself, turns Stylites unless his pillar stands in the market place. Ten miles from this strange Good Friday we passed an equally strange Easter in the Indian pueblo of San Ildefonso, whose many generations of Catholicism do not prevent invoking the gods who have given service even longer than the Christian’s deities. They shake well and mix them, somewhat after the fashion of my colored laundress who confessed she always wore a hoodoo charm:--“Of course I’se a good Christian, too, but the Bible says, don’t it, the Law’d he’ps them as he’ps they-selves?” Somewhat in this spirit, Easter Sunday was chosen for the Rain Dance which was to end a long drought. For miles we passed buckboards carrying large Indian families endimanchées with rainbow hues; Indian bucks on little neat-footed ponies, their square-chopped raven hair banded with scarlet or purple, wearing short gay velvet shirts, buttoned with silver shells bartered from the Navajos, white cotton trousers, or the more modern blue overalls, henna-colored moccasins, silver buttoned on their tiny feet. Their necks and waists were loaded with wampum and turquoise-studded silver, their faces rouged.