e tribal stories,
not all are expected to be good story-tellers. Story-telling is a gift,
we know, and primitives know this too, so that everywhere we have
pointed out a few individuals who are the best story-tellers, usually an
old man, sometimes an old woman, and occasionally, as the writer has
seen it, a young man of some dramatic ability. When an important story
furnishing a religious or social precedent is called for, either in
council meeting or ceremonial, the custodian of the stories is in
demand, and is much looked up to; yet primitives rarely create an office
or station for the narrator, nor is the distinction so marked as the
profession of the medicine man and the priest.

=Service of Myth=

As to the service of myth in primitive life, Wissler[17] says: "It
serves as a body of information, as stylistic pattern, as inspiration,
as ethical precepts, and finally as art. It furnishes the ever ready
allusions to embellish the oration as well as to enliven the
conversation of the fireside. Mythology, in the sense in which we have
used the term, is the carrier and preserver of the most immaterial part
of tribal culture."

[Footnote 17: Wissler, Clark, Op. cit., p. 258.]

=Hopi Story-Telling=

There comes a time in the Hopi year when crops have been harvested, most
of the heavier and more essentially important religious ceremonials have
been performed in their calendar places, and even the main supply of
wood for winter fires has been gathered. To be sure, minor dances, some
religious and some social, will be taking place from time to time, but
now there will be more leisure, leisure for sociability and for
story-telling.

[Illustration: Figure 4.--Kiva at Old Oraibi.

--Courtesy Arizona State Museum.]

In the kivas (See Figure 4) the priests and old men will instruct the
boys in the tribal legends, both historical and mythological, and in the
religious ceremonies in which they are all later supposed to
participate. In the home, some good old story-telling neighbor drops in
for supper, and stories are told for the enjoyment of all present,
including the children; all kinds of stories, myths, tales of adventure,
romances, and even bed-time stories. Indian dolls of painted wood and
feathers, made in the image of the Kachinas, are given the children, who
thus get a graphic idea of the supposed appearance of the heroes of some
of these stories.

The Hopi, like many primitive people, believe that when a bi