Let me not be thought for a moment to be opposed to any healthful recreation or sport. If golf be pursued as a recreation, for fun, I am heartily in accord with it and its promoters. It is when it is taken as an “exercise,” as a _substitute for honest and useful labor_, that I protest against it, as a fraud, a delusion, a snare, and a contemptible subterfuge. If you want real exercise, real work, go and relieve some poor fellow-man of his excess of hard work. Tell him you have come to give him an hour’s rest, that he may go and study nature, go and look at the flowers of your garden, wander into the woods and hear the birds sing, or visit the public library and read some entertaining and instructive book. If you are too ashamed to openly try to give an hour or two of rest and change to your “brother” man, go and chop the wood for the house, dig up the potato patch, wheel out the manure from the stable, or do some other _useful_ and beneficial thing. Pleasure is pleasure, sport is sport, fun is fun, but to engage in these sports seriously, as a physical exercise to counteract the effects of your evil dietetic habits or other grossnesses, is to add hypocrisy and subterfuge to evil living. [Illustration: HOPI INDIAN WEAVING A DRESS FOR HIS WIFE.] What labor the Indian has to do he does gladly, cheerfully, openly. He is not ashamed to have soiled hands or to be caught in the act. In this I am heartily in accord with him. If I ever wrote a creed one of the first articles of my religion would be: “I believe in the benefit and joy of physical labor.” If I had my way I would compel every member of the so-called “learned” professions (!), from preacher to lawyer, teacher and doctor, statesman, politician, and bartender, to spend not less than three hours at hard physical labor _every day_, and as for my brother preachers, I would put them to road-making every Monday, for half the day at least, so that by practical knowledge of road-making on earth they might be better able to preach to their congregations the following Sunday about the road to heaven. There is nothing that more reveals that we are a people of _caste_ and class than the attitude of the rich and the “learned” toward physical labor. I am not in sympathy with that attitude in any respect; I despise, hate, loathe it, and would see it changed. To the Indian, for his honest respect for and indulgence in physical labor, I give my adherence and honor. [Illustration: VARIOUS ARTICLES OF USE AND ORNAMENT MADE AND DECORATED BY INDIANS.] CHAPTER IX THE INDIAN AND PHYSICAL LABOR FOR GIRLS AND WOMEN