Most certainly I will! The idea that we, the superior, the wise race, use designs in our goods that are supposed to be beautiful to us, and yet that have no meaning! What absurdity and foolishness for our girls and women to spend hours on “fancy-work” (!), the designs of which are a crazy, intricate something to be dreaded rather than admired. The Indians have more sense than to waste their time over such foolishness. They have studied Nature in all her varying forms, and their minds are stored up with a thousand and one designs which they can transfer at pleasure to their basketry, pottery, or blanketry. I have had the pleasure of teaching this basic principle of art work to many white women, and I learned it from the Indian. One woman wanted to get a design for her sofa pillows. I asked her if she had no flowering vine over her porch. She said “Yes.” “Then copy its leaf and flower,” was my reply, and when she did so, and saw the beauty of the design she had _created_ from Nature, her soul was filled with a new joy, and she wrote me that few things had given her more pleasure than the discovery of that basic principle. [Illustration: BASKET BOWL MADE BY PALATINGWA WEAVER.] Think of the white race making baskets. Where do they go to for their forms and designs? In thousands of cases they take my own books and copy from them! But where did I get them? I am no creative artist, no inventor of design! I got them, “body, soul, and breeches,” from the Indian,--every one of them; and yet the “superior race” must go to them to copy, instead of so disciplining the powers of observation from Nature that designs for embroidery, for basketry, for fancy-work of every description, are contained within their own memories. The Indian’s life has trained these wonderful faculties of observation and memory. He was compelled to watch the animals in order that he might avoid those that were dangerous and catch those that were good for food; to follow the flying birds that he might know when and where to trap them and secure their eggs; the fishes as they spawned and hatched; the insects as they bored and burrowed; the plants and trees as they grew and budded, blossomed and seeded. He became familiar, not only with such simple things as the movements of the polar constellations and the retrograde and forward motions of the planets, but also with the less known spiral movements of the whirl-winds as they took up the sands of the desert; and the zigzags of the lightning were burned into his consciousness and memory in the fierce storms that, again and again, in darkest night, swept over the exposed area in which he roamed; with the flying of the birds, the graceful movements, the colors, and markings of the snakes, the peculiar wigglings of insects, and their tracks, and those of reptiles, birds, and animals, whether upon the sand, the snow, the mud, or more solid earth, he soon became familiar. The rise and fall of the mountains and valleys, the