worthy of congressional halls or countryhouse week ends of a stateroom rather than our crowded section. How will it look in those Mexican rooms in Santa Fe, where we are to live while we rebuild our mud-roofed adobe?

"Do you think it will take a week to do the work on the house?" Her voice is casual.

"Perhaps all summer," I answer, instinctively putting on the brakes. A week! How utterly themselves one's friends are. This delightful creature is always trying to cheat an unsatisfied desire to lead twenty lives by spurring Time beyond his fastest gallop. But whatever our temperamental differences, we are equally determined to make the repairs ourselves, with no contractor and-in spite of our lack of Spanishwith "Mexican labor." That is the whole point of our adventure-to plunge in up to the eyes and learn to swim while we flounder.

Meanwhile we revive our spirits by studying the deed which I signed for us both in the Capital Pharmacy on the Santa Fe Plaza, some fourteen months ago:

the following lands and premises [it reads], situate in the Tesuque Valley in the County of Santa Fe, State of New Mexico, as follows-to wit: A piece or parcel of land containing approximately two acres, commonly known as part of the Dominguez property, including a house of three rooms, bounded on the north by the lands of Salomé Martinez, on the west by public road leading past the Tesuque schoolhouse, on the south by a line commencing at the southwest corner and running thence in a southeasterly direction to the ditch, thence circling a hill or knoll lying south of the house, to a point where a line running north will intersect the Martinez property about fifteen feet below the acequia.

I doubt whether the study of this strange legal document would enlighten the editor, who begged me to tell him why a woman who might live in France "should go and bury herself in the desert." Perhaps he would wonder still more if he could see, as I do, our very near neighbor, Salomé, with his quizzical canny face and his pointed Mexican hat and his dark-skinned progeny. . . . And the Acequia Madre encircling our house like a moat. . . . And the wild array of pink foothills the Creator has slung to

Illinois, Kansas. Stale dust, aching heat, ugly frame villages. The only thing, to-day, that tells me why I am on this train is the memory of the Chicago Lake front on Saturday afternoon. A gorgeous, a joyous, a triumphantly "Western" sight. The swift motor that met us made one leap for that blue-gold shore, and all the miles it devoured on the way to Winnetka seemed lined with shining bathers-bathers who came pouring half naked out of the black city streets. Chicago, I know, does not consider itself "West" at all, and in Santa Fe every other man says he comes from a still more western "East," say from Minnesota or Michigan. But imagine a Boston street car full of women in bathing suits! Imagine battalions of bath-toweled males swarming through the Fifties and Sixties to New York's East River'

June 14th.

The Southwest at last! Our train should normally be skirting Colorado, but the Pueblo washouts have driven it far out of its course. We awoke in the red hills of Oklahoma. Now we are wandering through flat Texas country and already the air has the tang of sheer space, and the light that bathes the land is something with color, luminosity, substance almost, instead of the thin, vapid stuff we call light in New York. Already the railroad has become, not just a minor part of a populous mechanical world, but the one vital shining thread that binds man to his fellows across lonely distance.

OUR HOUSE AS WE FOUND IT

"Yes, ma'am," says the friendly-faced young brakeman-we are standing on the rear platform of the last car, the better to view these wide plains with their great herds of cattle, long purple shadows, and recurrent windmills"yes, ma'am, the wind blows three hundred and sixty-five days in the year in Texas. . . . No, I was born in Arkansas, but it don't do to say so here."

At this point our friend waves to a solitary feminine figure standing at the door of one of the match-box stations that swirl out of the empty plain.

"Telegraph operator. . . . Nice girl. .. Hope" (with a deprecating blush) "you folks don't think I was flirting with her."

The strictly unlimited trains that accept passengers for Santa Fe carry no dining cars west of Kansas City, and to-night in the Harvey Dining Room,