n the broad shadows of adobe door-ways, gaping, and
switching their legs with bamboo canes. "It's magnificent," one seemed
to hear them mutter, "but it isn't war!" Groups of Mexicans stood about,
or, selecting a white wall, leaned against it, as they are apt to do at
home, for the better relief of their swarthy faces and brilliant scarfs;
and slowly moving down the street, stopping occasionally to speak to the
various clusters of men, there went the beneficent if somewhat untidy
figure of the Catholic father, in whose company we had breakfasted, a
fat, jolly, anecdotal inheritor of the mantle of some founder of the
Missions. The sun took absolute and merciless possession of the street.
You put your hand in your pocket for the smoked glass through which you
observed the last eclipse. Everything seemed bleached,--the white
buildings, the yellow road, the eyebrows of the cow-boys.

We did the drive of twenty miles to the ranch in a canvas-topped buggy,
drawn by a pair of devil-may-care little nags, who took us across dry
_arroyos_ and the rocky beds of running streams in a style that promised
to make sticks of the vehicle. It held good, however, and rattled out a
sort of derisive snicker at every fresh attempt to shiver it. The
country through which we passed afforded views of superb breadth and a
most interesting and delightful quality. No landscape has in the exact
sense such charm as one in which Nature manifests herself in a large and
simple way: one feels with a thrill that she is about to tell the
secret. The earth lay almost in its nakedness beneath the inane dome of
the sky. But over the large simplicity of form one was soon aware of an
exquisite play of hues. The easy undulations, as they ran off to the
unattainable horizon, were so many waves of delicate and varying color.
There were great sweeps of ochre, of gray, of fresh, light green,
pointed with black dots of live-oak, and traversed by tortuous lines of
indigo where the pecan treed creeks pursued their foiled courses, and
troops of little hills grouped themselves about,--pink, pinkish, purple,
purpling blue, white, as they faded from view like the evanescent
cherubs in the corner of an old master. The hills, however, were little
only because the stretch was so vast; it was really a broad plafond upon
which they had solemnly entered to dance a minuet with the playful
shadows of the clouds. The sky possessed everything. There was so much
of it that existence se