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led the way in the tottery, shoulder-borne manner of Catholic saints in Italy. He had one or two attendant Franciscan priests. But the bitten Mongolian faces of Pueblo elders hedged him about. And he was followed by a mixed rout of tapercarrying, intoning Indians and Spaniards, all marching and chanting in an extraordinary dusty glare.

I have never seen such whiteness. No wonder the houses of Santo Domingo are

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built with deep shaded portales edged with adobe walls. The upper tier (approached by ladders and set back some distance from the edge of the lower roofs) have not only portales, but screens of green boughs. We climbed a ladder, and paid a small sum to occupy a red blanket on the dangling edge of such a shady roof.

MEXICAN VISITORS AT THE MUD HOUSE

The Saint came to rest in a rustic shrine built for him at the end of the Plaza-under the satisfied gaze of the watchers on the roofs. So far as I could read the faces of these Indian spectators, their patron was now become a sort of functionary like the Governor; or perhaps a holy personage like the Sun Priest or the Cacique, or possibly a sort of God of Rain. Indian faces are harder to read than Indian colors. Yet the colors, too, are subtle and complicated. Velvet shirts, belts and chains of wrought silver, turquois beads, striped blankets, brilliant silk scarfs, have a beauty in themselves. But their great beauty in Pueblo hands lies in their combination. This combination reveals a decorative sense more bold and varied and precise than that of Bakst himself. And there was as much beauty of sculptural grouping as of color. lical simplicity, Greek proportion, Barbaric power, Oriental detachment-the clustered figures on the roofs, the massed groups along the white porticos, seemed to embody the absolute of all the catch phrases, and give it a ring of discovery. But suddenly all eyes were drawn to a great, round yellow khiva, like a mediæval tower. Out of its sacred bowels, its round, dark inner chamber, the dancwere emerging Friezelike, they

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stood above its pale, walled top against basicly the same. But that was the the blue.

Friezelike they turned, a line of men, a line of women; friezelike they wound downward and started their rhythmic dance. A hundred men with red-brown, nude bodies, white loin cloths, coyote skins, and floating, shining hair; hundred women, barefoot under their black, short shifts, with blue tablitas poised like monuments above their square-cut locks. Two long lines, moving in single file to a double beat. Heavy, ripe-breasted women stirring evergreen boughs from still, stoic wrists. Lithe, free-leaping men shaking gourds with vehement sweep. And, wound about their double isolation like a sort of moving pattern, the black and white Koshare, the comic clown-devils, the holy delight makers.

Spring Dance the dance of feathery blossom-time, the dance of the ecstasy of germination. And this was the Summer Dance the dance of full fruition. Here in the syncopation of feet, in the echo of drums, in the hoarse, insistent cry of choral voices, was harvest, teeming, prolific, overwhelming. The force of great yellow ears bursting free of their lush green sheaths. And the rain the dancers were invoking was no soft spring patter; it was a purple summer tempest, a cloudburst, a clash of fire and flood. As the day wore on and one group of dancers succeeded another and the sun stood always more high and burning in the sky, the pulsation grew volcanic, hypnotic. It racked our nerves, it tortured our eyeballs, it beset our ears. It blasted, it demented us till at last we fled away. But we had scarcely reached the Indian fields when, with a grand burst of thunder, down came the ease of rain. (To be concluded)

a Corn Dance at San Felipe pueblo on May 1st of last year. The costumes, the colors, the measures were

THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH

VII. THE TEMPLE OF SILENCE

BY GILBERT K. CHESTERTON

HAROLD MARCH and the few who

cultivated the friendship of Horne Fisher, especially if they saw something of him in his own social setting, were conscious of a certain solitude in his very sociability. They seemed to be always meeting his relations and never meeting his family. Perhaps it would be truer to say that they saw much of his family and nothing of his home. His cousins and connections ramified like a labyrinth all over the governing class of Great Britain, and he seemed to be on good, or at least on good-humored, terms with most of them. For Horne Fisher was remarkable for a curious impersonal information and interest touching all sorts of topics, so that one could sometimes fancy that his culture, like his colorless, fair mustache and pale, drooping features, had the neutral nature of a chameleon. Anyhow, he could always get on with viceroys and Cabinet Ministers and all the great men responsible for great departments, and talk to each of them on his own subject, on the branch of study with which he was most seriously concerned. Thus he could converse with the Minister for War about silkworms, with the Minister of Education about detective stories, with the Minister of Labor about Limoges enamel, and with the Minister of Missions and Moral Progress (if that be his correct title) about the pantomime boys of the last four decades. And as the first was his first cousin, the second his second cousin, the third his brotherin-law, and the fourth his uncle by marriage, this conversational versatility certainly served in one sense to create a happy family. But March never. seemed to get a glimpse of that domestic

interior to which men of the middle classes are accustomed in their friendships, and which is indeed the foundation of friendship and love and everything else in any sane and stable society. He wondered whether Horne Fisher was both an orphan and an only child.

Sir

It was, therefore, with something like a start that he found that Fisher had a brother, much more prosperous and powerful than himself, though hardly, March thought, so entertaining. Henry Harland Fisher, with half the alphabet after his name, was something at the Foreign Office far more tremendous than the Foreign Secretary. Apparently, it ran in the family, after all; for it seemed there was another brother, Ashton Fisher, in India, rather more tremendous than the Viceroy. Sir Henry Fisher was a heavier, but handsomer edition of his brother, with a brow equally bald, but much more smooth. He was very courteous, but a shade patronizing, not only to March, but even, as March fancied, to Horne Fisher as well. The latter gentleman, who had many intuitions about the half-formed thoughts of others, glanced at the topic himself as they came away from the great house in Berkeley Square.

"Why, don't you know," he observed, quietly, "that I am the fool of the family?"

"It must be a clever family," said Harold March, with a smile.

"Very gracefully expressed," replied Fisher; "that is the best of having a literary training. Well, perhaps it is an exaggeration to say I am the fool of the family. It's enough to say I am the failure of the family."

"It seems queer to me that you should

fail especially," remarked the journalist. "As they say in the examinations, what did you fail in?"

"Politics," replied his friend. "I stood for Parliament when I was quite a young man and got in by an enormous majority, with loud cheers and chairing round the town. Since then, of course, I've been rather under a cloud."

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"I'm afraid I don't quite understand the of course, answered March, laughing.

"That part of it isn't worth understanding," said Fisher. "But as a matter of fact, old chap, the other part of it was rather odd and interesting. Quite a detective story in its way, as well as the first lesson I had in what modern politics are made of. If you like, I'll tell you all about it." And the following, recast in a less allusive and conversational manner, is the story that he told.

Nobody privileged of late years to meet Sir Henry Harland Fisher could believe that he had ever been called Harry. But, indeed, he had been boyish enough when a boy, and that serenity which shone on him through life, and which now took the form of gravity, had once taken the form of gayety. His friends would have said that he was all the more ripe in his maturity for having been young in his youth. His enemies would have said that he was still light minded, but no longer light hearted. But in any case, the whole of the story Horne Fisher had to tell arose out of the accident which had made young Harry Fisher private secretary to Lord Saltoun. Hence his later connection with the Foreign Office, which had, indeed, come to him as a sort of legacy from his lordship when that great man was the power behind the throne. This is not the place to say much about Saltoun, little as was known of him and much as there was worth knowing. England has had at least three or four such secret statesmen. An aristocratic polity produces every now and then an

aristocrat who is also an accident, a man of intellectual independence and insight, a Napoleon born in the purple. His vast work was mostly invisible, and very little could be got out of him in private life except a crusty and rather cynical sense of humor. But it was certainly the accident of his presence at a family dinner of the Fishers, and the unexpected opinion he expressed, which turned what might have been a dinnertable joke into a sort of small sensational novel.

Save for Lord Saltoun, it was a family party of Fishers, for the only other distinguished stranger had just departed after the dinner, leaving the rest to their coffee and cigars. This had been a figure of some interest—a young Cambridge man named Eric Hughes who was the rising hope of the party of Reform, to which the Fisher family, along with their friend Saltoun, had long been at least formally attached. The personality of Hughes was substantially summed up in the fact that he talked eloquently and earnestly through the whole of dinner, but left immediately after to be in time for an appointment. All his actions had something at once ambitious and conscientious; he drank no wine, but was slightly intoxicated with words. And his face and phrases were on the front page of all the newspapers just then, because he was contesting the safe seat of Sir Francis Verner in the great by-election in the west. Everybody was talking about the powerful speech against squirarchy which he had just delivered; even in the Fisher circle everybody talked about it except Horne Fisher himself, who sat in a corner, lowering over the fire. In his early manhood the manner which afterward became languid had rather the air of being sullen; he drifted about and dipped into odd books and odd subjects; in contrast with his political family, his future seemed featureless and undetermined.

"We jolly well have to thank him for putting some new life into the old

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FISHER WENT TO AND FRO AMONG THE COTTAGES AND COUNTRY INNS VoL.CXLIV. No.864.–99

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