e Jesuit
missions famous all through Europe of the Seventeenth Century. Why, do
you know, this Franciscan mission, with its three priests and two lay
helpers, is sustained on the small sum of $1,000 a year; and out of his
share of that, Father Berrard has managed to buy a printing press and
issue a scholarly work on the Navajos, costing him $1,500!

Next morning, when Mother Josephine, of Miss Drexel's Mission School,
drove us back to the Franciscan's house, we saw proofs of a second
volume on the Navajos, which Father Berrard is issuing; a combined
glossary and dictionary of information on tribal customs and arts and
crafts and legends and religion; a work of which a French academician
would be more than proud. Then he shows us what will easily prove the
masterpiece of his life--hundreds of drawings, which, for the last ten
years, he has been having the medicine men of the Navajos make for
their legends, of all the authentic, known patterns of their blankets
and the meanings, of their baskets and what they mean, and of the
heavenly constellations, which are much the same as ours except that the
names are those of the coyote and eagle and other desert creatures
instead of the Latin appellations. Lungren and Burbank and Curtis and
other artists, who have passed this way, suggested the idea. Someone
sent Father Berrard folios of blank drawing boards. Sepia made of coal
dust and white chalk made of gypsum suffice for pigments. With these he
has had the Indian medicine men make a series of drawings that excels
anything in the Smithsonian Institute of Washington or the Field Museum
of Chicago. For instance, there is the map of the sky and of the milky
way with the four cardinal points marked in the Navajo colors, white,
blue, black and yellow, with the legend drawn of the "great medicine
man" putting the stars in their places in the sky, when along comes
Coyote, steals the mystery bag of stars--and puff, with one breath he
has mischievously sent the divine sparks scattering helter-skelter all
over the face of heaven. There is the legend of "the spider maid"
teaching the Navajos to weave their wonderful blankets, though the Hopi
deny this and assert that their women captured in war were the ones who
taught the Navajos the art of weaving. There is the picture of the
Navajo transmigration of souls up the twelve degrees of a huge corn
stalk, for all the world like the Hindoo legend of a soul's travail up
to life. You must not fo