Wilbur had invention. It was a clever tale which he told. It would require, later on, certain precautions to establish it upon a lasting basis, but it was clever. "She is in her own room," said Wilbur, finally. "She seemed quiet. I would advise nobody, not even her mother, to disturb her to-night. I have never seen any human being in such a panic of terror." Wilbur had been telling a tale of Minnie coming home from the house of one of her girl friends down a lonesome side street, of a following man, of a détour, a mad scamper to the shelter of some thick undergrowth until she encountered Wilbur. "She seemed quiet at last," Wilbur went on. "When we passed my house I made her stop, and my housekeeper gave her a glass of port and a quieting powder which she herself takes for insomnia. She will sleep if not disturbed."

Minnie rose and closed her door softly. Then the house became very still. After a few minutes, however, her door was opened by degrees and a head thrust in. "She is there," proclaimed Maria quite audibly, evidently to Minnie's mother and sister. There were warning hushes, and the door was closed again.

Minnie lay waiting. She had no doubt whatever of what she was to do. She had not the shadow of a doubt. She was not going to remain silent with regard to what she had done. She was going to destroy not only love, but the merest respect for herself in Edward Yale's heart. She thought with hot scorn of Wilbur Bates guarding her secret and waiting for her possible yielding to his suit. She was going to tell the truth. There was absolutely no struggle whatever in her mind, which was fixed in its purpose. She only waited until she was sure that her mother, sister, and Maria were in their rooms. She knew that the poor minister would have to remain in his study writing his sadly interrupted

sermon.

Finally she rose and stole down-stairs. She dared not knock at the study door, and was relieved to find it slightly ajar, with a long glimmer of light marking its length. She pushed the door gently open. The minister did not hear her. He sat with his side face to her, and he looked very young, very tired and disheartened.

The minister was young, and he had a boyish air which caused him to seem younger than he was. Minnie entered and closed the door softly behind her. Then he saw her.

He started up, looking fairly frightened, and tried to speak, but Minnie interrupted him. She told in a low, mechanical voice, as if she were repeating a lesson, her whole pitiful, absurd little story, but she did omit her eavesdropping in the arbor. That involved too much. She simply said, "You had vexed me about something, and I took that awful way to get even."

To her astonishment, the young man looked relieved. "Goodness!" he exclaimed, like the veriest boy. "You do take a load off my mind. I have been reading that sentence over, and I had an uncle who was crazy, and I wondered if anything were going wrong with me."

Minnie stared. The tears welled up in her blue eyes. She felt as if she had brought her feet down with a horrible jolt upon nothing at all. "I am sorry,” she almost sobbed.

Edward Yale looked at her: little, dimpled, feminine thing, weak and strong, harmonies and discords, altogether darling and the beloved of his soul. Then he took her in his arms. "I nearly went mad when I thought you were lost, that something dreadful had happened to you," he said.

"Why?"

Haven't you

"Because I love you. known it all along?" "Then why did you say what you did to Wilbur this afternoon?" "He did not tell!"

'No, I heard. I was in the arbor. I could not help hearing."

Edward Yale hesitated. He colored. Then he spoke out like a man and called himself names. "I was a coward and a cad to speak so to Bates," he said. "But

well, I will not excuse myself. I was a coward and a cad, but I loved you; only- You shall have the whole truth. You deserve it. I loved you-who could help it?-but I did have doubts, even if you would so honor me, as to whether you would prove just the best wife for me in view of my-sacred calling. You are so very beautiful and you have always been so petted and—”

22

I

Next I asked about the location of the pottery. "I don't see any here. thought you said it was scattered everywhere. And yesterday, when I was up in the mountains, I could not find a bit, although I searched carefully. Is there any over yonder in the flat?"

My questions set him to thinking, and at once he began to find interest in the lives of his ancient predecessors. "You're right. The pottery isn't found everywhere. Now that I think of it, I've never saw any in the mountains or out in the adobe flats. It's always in the fine sand two or three miles from the foot of the mountains. Yes, sir, around these Jarilla Mountains it's always that-a-way, just a little way from the hills in the sand between the gravel and the adobe. Now why do you suppose that is?"

When we reached the first ruin, which at first sight appeared to be nothing but a barren waste of sand and scraggly bushes, I at once found a potsherd bearing a sym

FIG. 2-EVOLUTION OF AN INDIAN DESIGN

metrical design in black on a white ground. The settler soon found another, and as we held them side by side for comparison, he made a discovery. "Look; they're different. Ain't they pretty! Now I never took notice before how neat them patterns is. Here's another. And look at this red one with a brown pattern. Say, those old fellows must have spent a heap of time thinking up how to do their painting.”

The significance of the designs on our bits of pottery was far greater than the settler realized. As every one knows, artistic peculiarities, such as peculiar methods of ornamenting clothing and dwellings, or special patterns for use upon pottery, are among the surest means of establishing the relationship of races, or the development of civilization, and are of great value for that purpose even where written records are available. Among races like those of ancient America, whose language is lost and who knew no form of writing, they become of double importance. Few save the student of the science of art, however, realize the wonderful way in which it is possible to trace the workings of the human mind by means of the stages through which some simple design has passed. For instance, who would say for a moment that the two conventional designs shown in Fig. 1 had anything to do with birds? Yet Mr. Kenneth M. Chapman, curator and artist of the Archeological Museum of New Mexico, assures us that such is the case. At first one is inclined to scoff at such a statement, but when the proof is presented skepticism quickly changes to belief. From potsherd after potsherd derived from ruins in all parts of the plateau region of northern New Mexico Mr. Chapman has patiently gathered innumerable designs, and has classified them as only an artist can. Thus he has obtained several series of from ten to thirty or forty stages each, which

show how the ancient Americans drew from nature at first, but little by little departed from the original models until finally the extreme of conventionality was the rule. The first artist, the great master, perhaps, who first conceived the idea of ornamenting pottery with something more than mere lines, looked at the birds around him and to the best of his ability drew what he saw, crudely, no doubt, but with unmistakable character. When others, the disciples or the imitators of the master, began to draw, they failed to turn back to nature. It was far easier to copy the drawings of another than to work out the lines for themselves. Each copy lost something of originality and force.

On this and the opposite page are a few samples taken from two of Mr. Chapman's long series. Perhaps the original. design was copied a hundred or a thousand times before it was transformed from the first to the second type of either series, but little by little a change took place. The two series appear to illustrate two diverse modes of development. In the first case a design resembling a Greek scroll was developed from some unknown origin, probably as an ornament for baskets long before pottery came into use. Later it was transferred to pottery, and the new conditions drew attention to its bird-like form. Thereupon it was regarded as a bird, and was used not only as a scroll, but independently. In some instances, although not commonly, wings were added; but, oddly enough, feet seem almost always to have been omitted, perhaps in tacit and quite unwitting recognition of the fact that the creature was not really a bird.

In the other case development followed different lines. Some genuine artist at first conceived the idea of drawing two birds together, one upright and the other reversed a simple design, in truth, and yet original. Conventionality could scarcely go further than in the final result-an oblong divided by diagonals into four triangles, the upper and lower of which are shaded. Yet even in this extreme the original design was still remembered, as is naïvely witnessed by the work of one unimaginative follower of tradition. At first he drew a simple oblong with diagonals and shading, but with nothing

VOL. CXXIV.-No. 740.-37

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FIG. 3-EVOLUTION OF AN INDIAN DESIGN

to suggest a bird. Then he felt that something was wrong. Probably he did not know that he had drawn two birds, but he remembered that the drawings on other people's pots were different from his, and so, not daring to depart by a hair's-breadth from tradition, he added the two little crooks which are all that remain of the birds' heads and beaks.

Such studies as those of Mr. Chapman are not of value only or chiefly to the artist. They belong to all who are interested in the study of the development of the human mind. How often, in Europe and Asia, we have had exactly what we seem to find here in early Americaa period of sudden initiative and individuality followed by a slow sinking into hidebound conventionality. We know practically nothing of the character of the primitive Americans of the Southwest. Yet we are probably not far wrong in assuming that the course of