Naprikan Halmoran

As we had now been four entire days without eating anything at all, I thought it was high time to open the valuable tin of anchovies--the only one in our possession. We had a terrible disappointment when I opened the tin. I had purchased it in S. Manoel from Mr. Barretto. To our great distress we discovered that instead of food it contained merely some salt and a piece of slate. This was a great blow to us. The box was a Brazilian counterfeit of a tin of anchovies. How disheartening to discover the fraud at so inopportune a moment! I had reserved the tin until the last as I did not like the look of it from the outside. We kept the salt--which was of the coarsest description.

The figures shown in the dry-paintings are conventionalized representations of the characters in Navaho mythology and of incidents in the myth. With how many such paintings the Navaho medicine-men are familiar is an unanswered question; but more than sixty have been noted, some of them most elaborate. In making them, the ground within the ceremonial hogan is evenly covered with fine brown earth, upon which the figures are drawn with fine sands and earths of many colors allowed to flow between the thumb and the first two fingers. The Navaho become so skilled in this work that they can draw a line as fine as a broad pencil mark. Many of the paintings are comparatively small, perhaps not more than four feet in diameter; others are as large as the hogan permits, sometimes twenty-four feet across. To make such a large painting requires the assistance of all the men who can conveniently work at it from early morning until mid-afternoon.

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