Somehow Walpi reminded me of the little hill town of Grasse, and the old parts of San Remo, on the Riviera. There was the same tolerance toward live stock in the narrow, unevenly paved streets; there were the same outside stairways, and roofed-in alleys and houses tumbling on each other, and looking into each other’s mouths; the same defiant position on the height, watchful of enemies, the same warm stucco and brightly painted doorways. Even the dark, velvety eyed children bore out the resemblance to Italy, as they slouched against a wall, as Italians love to do. A small army of children in one or less garments was watching us from the parapets; we pointed the camera at them, and snapped. When the film was developed only one child remained,--the rest had ducked. We met with less hospitality in Walpi than in the other two villages on the mesa. Doors were tightly closed, for the most part. A few inhabitants, mostly old women, let their curiosity overcome their pride, and called out to us. One woman was baking pottery in an oven edging the lane which was Walpi’s Main Street. She had buried it, and was raking sheep-dung over it to insure its being burned the peculiar reddish brown which the Hopis prefer in their pottery. A tiny burro wandered about at will, and the usual array of dogs yapped at us. At the great rock, the most conspicuous identifying mark in Walpi, which bisects the narrow street, and is so shaped that in a Northern country it would have to be called Thor’s Anvil, my eye was attracted by little sticks bound with feathers in the crevices of the rock. I pulled one out, and asked our guide what they were. “Don’t know,” he shouted, in the tone he used when speaking to us, perhaps thinking it more official. His face was stolid and stupid. Of course he knew. They were, as we afterward learned, the prayer sticks used in the Hopi ceremonies for rain. Across from Walpi, looking west over the desert, is a low long mesa. There the Indian youths go to hunt wild eaglets, to be used in the Snake Dance ceremonies. We saw a group of men, Indians and white, clustered with great interest about a rough box made of wooden slabs. As we came nearer, curious, we saw them jump quickly back, wary and respectful. A young eagle, with a heavy chain on one ankle, angry and ruffled stood at bay, its eyes gleaming red, its beak wide open and the feathers on its neck standing straight out. It was not a creature to tamper with, even chained as it was. Never have I seen anything so angry in my life. It was the embodiment of Fury, of rage that, silent and impotent as it was, stays with me ever now. How far we Easterners have traveled from the life that was a commonplace to our ancestors! Here was the creature so native to our country that its likeness is on our national coin, yet outside a zoo it was the first eagle I had seen. I only recognized it as an eagle because its feather-trousered legs looked so like the St. Gaudens designs.