while the "curtain of the dark still hung in the sky. For the Colonel had asked us to stop for him just before sunrise and take him to the mesa-top, as we had told him that one of the most interesting features of the entire nine days' ceremonial was the foot-race of Hopi runners at the coming of the "yellow line," as the Hopis call the dawn.

The stars were still alight when we left our camp-fire, but we paused a moment to fill a bottle with hot coffee for the Colonel. When we reached the schoolhouse, the Colonel's room was empty. "One must indeed get up early to be abreast of Theodore Roosevelt," we told each other, rather shamefacedly.

Now to climb the Walpi trail, a steep six hundred feet, even on horseback, is no pleasant task before daylight (and breakfast!). But when we scrambled on foot to the summit, tired and breathless, there stood the Colonel, strong and secure, among the topmost rocks of the Hopi buttes, silhouetted against the "yel low line." The little incident was characteristic of his natural drive of energy, his unfailing promptitude, and his inborn quality of leadership. "After all," we said to him in apology, somewhat comforted by his enjoyment of our belated coffee," you are always before other people, anyway!"

The Indians had all, heard of his coming, and as the Hopi runners sped at top speed, lithe and swift, up that perpendicular trail, I thought that the hearty handclapping of the ex-" White Chief" added to the pride of the winner as he leaped lightly past the Colonel to the goal.

Then the people began to stream up the trail. They came on foot, in wagons, and on horseback, and from the mesatop we watched, the automobiles crawling over the sand like an eruption of ugly and alien beetles. Such a heterogeneous crowd as flocked from all directions to watch the Colonel watch the Indians! The rapid fire of kodaks snapping the ex-President accompanied us as we walked through the village, and I don't know how many times the Colonel was stopped for autographs, nor how many eager birds of prey who represented women's clubs somewhere in odd. corners of the continent swooped down upon him to ask if he remembered them. Of course he did he remembered them all, and he made countless people håppy forever after by the cordiality of his hand-shake.

Never before had the Hopi housetops sustained such masses of white humanity. We feared that the roofs would fall in! We also feared that the somber and barbaric drama of the Snake Dance would be interrupted by white chatter and laughter. But when up from the sunken kiva the bronzed form of the Asperger stepped from the ladder and stood, bowl in hand, like some vision of fertility, aloof and reverent, wreathed with green and girdled with white, there was a hush. We lost not a note of the first faint-heard tones of the song of the Antelope Priests-hummed rather than sung-a song that seemed to rise from

the depths of the germinating earth, making the listener's attention leap to a suspension of interest through its effect of immeasurable distance. And in silence we watched the graceful, sinewy Asperger tread the rock path at the mesa's edge with the dignity of some ancient god, leading the procession of Antelope Priests and scattering the sacred waters. Nor was there a murmur when the Snake Priests, all black and orange (as dramatic in coloring as in movement), filed into the dance plaza, supernatural and grandly terrible, like living symbols of that thunder and lightning for which the Hopis pray.

But the credit for silence was not altogether due to the receptive intuition of that great crowd. In a little preliminary speech one of the Government authorities (instigated by our party) reminded the white visitors that they were guests of the Indians, and they were therefore asked to treat the hospitality of their hosts with courtesy and to show the same respect to the native prayer that they would to a prayer of their own people. Probably many thus learned for the first time that the nine days' ceremonial, of which the dance on the open plaza was the final act, was a historic tribal. invocation imploring that flooding of the fields which in arid Arizona can alone bring fertility to the crops of the peaceful Hopi villagers.

The Colonel had witnessed, as have few white men, the more intimate ceremony of the washing of, the snakes by the Hopi priests in the kiva, the underground council chamber. He had seen with what entire fearlessness and astonishing ease the Indians handled the reptiles. Now he was to behold. each snake-brother," as the Indians called the snakes, "dance" in a ceremonial invocation with his human brother, the Snake Priest, who held the snake in his mouth so that man and snake seemed one. And after each snake, plucked at random from a receptacle held in a shrine of cottonwood boughs, was thus "danced" around the plaza it was dropped to the ground, to be picked up by the Antelope priests, who, at the close of the ceremony, held some half dozen snakes in each hand.

The performers then dashed down the mesa, snakes in hand, to scatter these reptilian symbols of lightning and messengers of rain to the "Four-WorldPoints," there to speed the prayer. And always at the close of the Snake Danceso say those white people who have lived long in Hopi-Land-the heavens darken, the skies become black with clouds and orange with lightning like the Snake Dancers, and a swift torrent of rain proves anew to the reverent and faithful Hopis the power of their ancient dramatic ritual. Said an observer: "They pray as earnestly as any white man, even if they do it in a different way. Why shouldn't their prayers be answered?"

The very next day the Colonel summoned us to hear him read aloud his article. With characteristic speed he had already finished it, and his achievement

seemed to me almost superhuman. He had been sightseeing steadily ever since he had arrived at the close of a long, hard horseback trip through the Navajo desert and this in August, and at an altitude of seven thousand feet! He had no secretary, so that dictation was impossible, and every word of his article was laboriously penciled by hand. How and when had he found the time?

As he read we discussed different points of his paper, and I was amazed at the electric snap with which the Colonel would grasp a suggestion and without a moment's hesitation put it into a written form far clearer and more succinct than the suggester could have supplied. Before the words were off one's lips he would say, "I agree, I have it !"

When he had finished reading, he turned to us and said, with hearty and engaging frankness: "Now you two people have studied these Indians for years; perhaps you think it rather superficial of me to be here three days and then write an article about them. But if I don't write the article now, I never will, because my life is too full, and I have to finish each episode of it, as far as possible, as I go. Every word of this article has got to be done to-day, for to-morrow I shall reach Ganado,' and there I shall find a pile of mail a foot high; and after that I leave for the East. There I must prepare for my South American trip.2 You may not believe it, but all the speeches I am to make in South America must be written down before I leave this country. When I get to South America, I shall be met by committees and driven about and invited to receptions and dinners, with no time to myself. So everything must be ready before I get there, though of course I shall make additions and extemporaneous changes as I deliver the addresses; I can never afford to be in arrears. [More than once I heard him say this.] So this Indian article must be ready to mail to The Outlook when I reach Ganado. I hope the article will do some good. You see," he added, courteously and kindly, "I have chosen my sources of information. I saw you first, learned what to see, saw for myself, then wrote."

We remarked on the order and precision, and, above all, on the executive quality of Colonel Roosevelt's mind, charged with such dynamic energy.

"I like the Strenuous Life, you know," he said, with a smile, "and I am going to South America now because I very much want to make that exploring trip and I don't want to miss that experience. Now, as I figure it" (order and precision again), "I have only about six more years of the strenuous life before me. I am nearly fifty-five, so I must do now those things that require physical endurance. I cannot put them off. For I suppose that after sixty it won't be well for me to tax my resistance in the same way." Six more years! When I read the

notice of the Colonel's death, I thought of this unconscious measuring of his days. For it was six years since he had thus forecast the length of his strenuous activities. Though his going was untimely and tore a gap in American life that no other personality can fill, yet it seemed characteristic. Decrepitude and age were not for him, whose mind and body so loved hard work and hard play. An enfeebled Roosevelt, even physically, was unthinkable.

And so he will remain in our minds a powerful figure vibrant with life to the end, even as we saw him on the Hopi buttes at dawn-up and on the mountain

PERI

tops before the world was half awake. Yet he had a curiously practical type of mind. His was not the vision of the dreamer so much as the vision of the doer, who so keenly saw things as they were that the foretelling of the logical sequence of events from facts at hand was inevitable to his systematic mind. We did not agree with all his findings in regard to the Indian problem, nor he with ours. But my prayer under the peach trees had been answered. For Theodore Roosevelt had an appreciation of historic and cultural values, of literature and art, beyond what the public usually credited him with. And his pro

phetic practicality saw what the American Indian might mean to our Nationsaw it and uttered it. In the death of him who had been so worthy a "Great Father. in Washington Father. in Washington" the Indians lost a friend who, had he not been pressed by other tasks of hourly need and world magnitude, would have continued to help them as private citizen, even as he had helped them while President-with actual deeds, not broken promises.

NOTE: The article by Theodore Roosevelt alluded to in this paper was entitled "The Hopi Indian Snake Dance," and was published in The Outlook of October 13, 1913.

RHAPS you remember that last September, when we were gathering our fullest forces to strike a final blow at Germany, the War Department stepped up to the registrar's desk of nearly six hundred of our colleges and matriculated for a couple of hundred thousand young men. Not upon assurance of exactly drawn contract, but merely upon the verbal "Go ahead!" of the Government, our colleges patriotically plunged into the emergency work by spending (often borrowing) millions of dollars in new buildings, barracks, increased instruction staffs, text-books, and a score of other things. Later a hasty form of contract, loosely drawn to allow for possible changes in costs, was agreed to between the Government and nearly seven hundred institutions, and monthly payments were begun. But a week after the armistice the Student Army Training Corps was ordered demobilized; by Christmas the order was carried out and Government contracts were abruptly suspended. Would the average citizen blame the college presidents and trustees for getting frightened? For who ever heard of a Government contract being settled within years and years, and, besides, didn't a Washington cancellation always mean a big loss?

The Government's surprise party to those responsible for the higher learning is one of the most refreshing and unusual events of the war's aftermath. Despite the earlier errors of the S. A. T. C., due in a large measure to misunderstandings, it is certain that the colleges' last remembrance of it is pleasant. The consensus of opinion of collegiate executives, as revealed in letters to the Committee on Education and Special Training, which represented the War Department, is that the Government's settlement of contracts not only was just, even generous, but that its accomplishment within three months was a phenomenal piece of business management.

Difficult as it may be for the public to believe, it is nevertheless true that one set of Government obligations has actually been met with real speed and a

BY JOHN R. COLTER laudable lack of petty haggling. The way the miracle happened is interesting.

When the armistice made unnecessary the continuance of the S. A. T. C., the commitments on the part of the six hundred and eighty-odd institutions had run into the millions, a good deal of it borrowed. To train the men as the War Department had asked was a task requiring great outlays in mess-halls, barracks, foodstuffs, and means of instruction. One college had laid in $20,000 worth of canned goods. A dollar a day per student for housing and subsistence and the regular tuition charge figured to a daily basis-these the War Department contracted to pay until a more accurately drawn contract could be arrived at. July 1, 1919; was the limit of the temporary contract. The way the colleges threw themselves into this war work was inspiring; they got ready with an alacrity worthy of "big business." But when they had trained the Corps only eighty-two days, the machinery was no longer required.

The alarm over the financial situation in collegiate circles was recognized by an order from the Secretary of War authorizing "equitable adjustments" with all institutions. This phrase, presumably, has been ordered by Government heads since time immemorial-with well-known results. But the Business Department of the Committee on Education and Special Training, under the direction of E. K. Hall, of New York, took it literally. Conceivably it would have been within the province of Governmental reputation the province of Governmental reputation to consume leisurely the six hundred and eighty-six separate claims and settle the last one somewhere in the early 1950'switness Civil War claims settled within the year. Instead, the Committee divided the country into twelve districts, organized in each a fully equipped claimsettling machinery headed by a district business manager and an accountant to specialize on the district's college claims, and proceeded full blast.

Consider that educational institutions, as a rule, are not models of business efficiency and that some of them know cost-accounting not at all, and you will

understand why it is not regarded as a sinecure to satisfy their claims for what they stood to lose by a suspension of the Government contract. For reimbursement for cost incurred was the basis of the settlement, the whole theory of the S. A. T. C. contract being that the colleges would contribute their services and facilities without profit. By March 15 a third of the claims had been presented, and payment begun at once. By April, 100 had been paid; by May, 300; by June 6, practically every one of the six hundred odd-each having been legally, accurately, fairly, and, what is important, personally adjusted by authorized representatives of the Committee. Nearly ten million dollars was paid out by the War Department to keep faith with the colleges, and it is fair to say that none of them is a loser for its splendid co-operation in the emergency.

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It is gratifying that the outcome of this co-operative undertaking," says Chancellor Brown, "leaves a situation of such mutual confidence and good will between the War Department and New York University."

"The prompt and businesslike manner of settlement has pleased the University of Chicago," is the comment of Harry Pratt Judson; while President Faunce quotes Brown University as regarding the Government's settlement "not only just but liberal;" and Rush Rhees, President of Rochester, believes the treatment of the colleges as so "expeditious and reasonable as to be worthy of congratulation." Scores of similar testimonials, the consistent keynote of which is satisfaction and appreciation of the Government's regard for the colleges, indicate a happy termination of an important piece of war work. It is a fine thing, a sig nificant thing, that it turned out this way, not only because the halls of learning are happier when they are saying, "Mirabile dictu!" instead of "Horribile visu!;" but because it may pave the way to a closer relation between the Federal Government and the colleges-something which, let us hope, it shall not take another war to effect.