look at the prehistoric pottery. José needs nails, locks for the doors, hinges. What a job it is to rebuild an adobe casa!

"Buenos dias, patrona!"

No mistaking that voice. There in the middle of the blazing street, his thin legs astride a diminutive gray burro, sits Salomé, our neighbor of Tesuque, two pack animals laden with wood before him. He lifts his hat, his little brown face spread over with a grin at his hum

VOL. CXLIV.-No. 863.-74

I

ble mode of address. "Patrona!" smell a rat. Salomé has thought better of his sulking. . . . Yes, he is asking me to allow him to cut our wood. And his son, Pedro, would be useful if we needed an extra workman.

"We'll think about it."

"Esta bueno, patrona. Muy bien." So, grinning back at me, he ambles on to barter his wood for groceries, I suppose, on the other side of the Plaza.

This shady quadrangle green space in a burnt land, spot to gossip and trade and watch the muchachas walk by-is a straight Spanish inheritance, and seems still to belong to Salomé and his kind. A vaguely cowboyish artist comes out of the New Museum as I pass. I suppose he thinks he owns the Plaza. A long row of Ford trucks parked in

front of the new movie theater (adobe towers can be overdone); of course, the confident American farmers think they are its lords and masters. But so far as I can see, every single Plaza bench is occupied by tawny furrowed persons who smell of a long, dusty road from a tawny furrowed cañon. Our Mexican neighbors of Tesuque never say, "I am going to town"; they always go "to the Plaza." I am just beginning to understand the symbolism, the lure it has kept from the pioneer days for the scattered ranches and villages of the Santa Fe region.

As I approach the Capital City Bank a wagon with a round canvas top like a plump white sausage drives up to the curb. On its seat two dark men in sombreros; behind, on a pile of alfalfa, a dark woman wearing over her head a black shawl with heavy knotted fringe. The woman climbs down, shakes out her purple-satin skirt, adjusts her shawl in the manner of Seville, and starts for the cathedral. One of the men descends also, lights a cigarette, looks easily about, spies a crony, and lounges with him to the Plaza bench, violently gestur

ing. I'll walk by. . . . Yes, I guessed right! The word that resounds is "Bursum."

My politicians are the same type as the men Gertrude and I employ for the repairs to our mud house. Fifty years ago their grandfathers were peons, to all intents and purposes slaves of the big Spanish landowners of the old Territory. Yet now these humble descendants wield the controlling vote in New Mexico. It is fashionable to call them "a race in decay." If so, decadence does not imply subservience to the American or Spanish-American ranchers who have gradually replaced the Spanish overlords. That I have already discovered. I met a descendant of the Conquistadores last year who winced visibly at the word "Mexican" and called too often on the memory of his ancestors. The "dominant American" had trodden rather brutally on his toes. But I wonder whether the native culture of the peasant Spaniard has not been fortified rather than transformed by "American influences." Neither sagebrush nor piñon seems more tenacious. We note, to be sure, a few signs of mod

ernism: Matias knows that New York is on the Atlantic Ocean; Josephine Alarid, our serving maid at our lodgings in town, would rather die than wear her mother's black shawl to mass, though it is wondrously becoming to her clear brown skin. But Salomé? I doubt if he is especially different from his greatgrandfather. For instance, he builds a new well, but continues to dip water from the irrigation ditch for drinking. And he calls no woman patrona in his heart. Isn't his adobe casa as good as or better than ours? And he has what we have not-a burro or two, several cows and pigs, some fields of alfalfa and chili, and a long, long hour, after he trades his wood, to discuss

the disposition of

his valuable vote in the Plaza of the state capital.

that goes on inside one's head to the jog trot of a horse, with the sun burning down on hard white road and piñondotted distance, can be called thought. About as intellectual as the purr of a cat behind the stove, this sense of physical well-being that fills me. Yet there is nothing really lulling and comatose about the New Mexico sun and heat. That's where the Southwest is different

Reflections on the country and people string themselves along the six miles to Tesuque (Gertrude is carpenter hunting and I ride on ahead to see that José does not do irreparable harm to the living-room floor). An hour's solitary ride is a rather pleasant oasis in a day that begins and ends with the sociabilities of the Camino del Monte Sol, and continues through the midday heat with the acute conflicts of Tesuque building. It is impossible to describe the vortex of activity in which we are whirled from cockcrow to sunset. But here at least I can gather my thoughts-if the process

and immobility.... Yesterday the coloring was pure joyous color-yellow, red, purple, blue-no line, no detail. The day before it was all geometrical patternlong horizontal sweeps of mesa, sharp slants of aspiring mountain, with nothing but cerulean space swimming between. To-morrow, every rock stratum, every flat roof, will stand out with microscopic clarity. No, the land is never twice alike

save in that magnitude and that majesty which give a stretch to the soul-or make it feel like a needle point in eternity. I can't be sure yet what the country does to my soul, but I know it keeps my eyes in such a state of bedazzlement that I have difficulty, once arrived at our devastated hilltop,

in focusing them on a floor.

Here is a specimen of the conversation that ensues:

I: "José, that board is five inches short of the wall."

J. (with a henpecked sigh): "Pardner" (he means my friend Gertrude) "he not like knot holes."

I: "But you should save the boards with knot holes for the roof." J. (shrugging his shoulders): "Matias he choose bad lumber."

I (firmly): "José, take up that board and use another."

J. (bending his lit

is a comfort to get away from repairs and Mexicans for an hour to the cool adobe in the apple orchard below. An adobe under a desert hill is capable, we discover, of having within an air of Middle Western comfort, even to polished oak and brass bedsteads.

tle black head crossly over the board and ripping it away so roughly that it splits in two): "That fél-low" (now he is trying to shift the blame to Steffanson, our late Swedish carpenter) "he no sabe how lay two by four."

What is one to do with such a workman? All Latin peoples are not, alas! gifted for craftsmanship. Anything less like French technic than Mexican technic can hardly be imagined. Another window frame gauged during the time we spent at dinner at the Harshes' just

now.

An excellent farmhouse dinner it was. Our sketchy and increasingly dusty lunches by the acequia are over and it

The telephone rings while we are at table. Mrs. Harsh, a young woman still, dark, and burnt darker by the sun, jumps up to answer: "Yes, it sure is. No, I didn't get to go to town to-day. . . . Why, I use Swansdown for my cake.

Sure I'll give it to you-three cups of flour, four eggs..."

It seemed to me at first that farm life in the Southwest does not differ greatly from farm life in New England. Yet it differs in one essential at least. It is founded on hope, not on despair; on action, not on inhibition. No setting

your teeth to meet the hard and grim in Tesuque; the world looks sunny. The children's faces show it. Edith's - a lovely, fresh young face below a crown of brown-gold hair-somehow reveals that at nineteen she can fully and freely choose her woman's destiny in this underfeminized land. And fourteen-year-old Frank, without a complex to impede, wants, with an openhearted smile, "to go East to college and be an engineer." His father and mother smile more soberly. They have neither of them seen the Atlantic or the Pacific.

Conversation is chiefly agricultural. Few apples this year. But the first cut

ting of alfalfa is just fine, and two more to come before summer ends.

"I have the water to-morrow," says the rancher, with satisfaction.

"But can't anyone draw on the irrigation ditch when he pleases?" asks Gertrude.

Far from it. "The water" so essential to all Southwestern farming is apportioned in turns by a potentate called the "Mayordomo"-a Mexican potentate whose decisions are not always popular with the "Americanos."

"You'll meet him soon enough. A oneeyed fellow." Mr. Harsh finds Mexicans to be "folks you can get on with if you treat 'em right. No reason why they'd be your slaves." His wife joins in, "The people around here are all good people." I needn't be afraid to live alone when Gertrude goes.

This pair has a rare poise and kindness and a humorous tolerance of our tenderfootedness. They never offer a suggestion, but are ready with a generous and helpful one when we ask for

locomotion but walking, from Mr. Harsh's milk truck to José's old buggy. So we are delighted when the two friends who share our town popotte decide to ride out to join us instead, at the incomparable sunset hour.

Nan Mitchell gravitates naturally toward the view and the frying pan. She loves great spaces and, after her experience in Serbia and devastated France, has a tendency to do more than her

it. Whatever our Mexican neighbors may prove, we are extraordinarily lucky in our American neighbors.

TESUQUE, July 2d.

We are cooking supper to-night on the ridge, over a fire built of odds and ends of lumber. It is a chore to get to the other side of Santa Fe in time for an evening meal after a day of Tesuque labors. We have tried every form of

share of hard work. Katharine, the artist, is fascinated by the details of building and decoration; she moves instinctively toward our paint pots-not to mention our acequia, into which she plunges almost before she gets off "Old Blue." She chooses a secluded mint-bordered curve where nobody but one of the little Salomés, herding calves and cows down from the hills for the night, could be a witness. Katharine fits, as no other Easterner does, into the New Mexican scene. Her thin, sinewy figure, her fascinating little dark face, her mop of black bobbed hair,

her bright-colored clothes, might have a Spanish derivation. All the Mexicans adore her even our neighbor readily lends a coffee pot at her behest. Even his snooping poodle licks her hand. She insists we misunderstand them both.

To-night we look with new feelings on the triangular field with the group of cottonwoods at its apex which stretches from the acequia back to Salomé's corral. It belongs by rights to this estate