ity of his
individuality, and is self-respecting and self-sufficient. He accepted
the form of religion professed by his Spanish conquerors, but without
abandoning his own, and that is practically the only concession his
persistent conservatism has ever made to external influence.

Laborious efforts have been made to penetrate the reserve with which the
involved inner life of this strange child of the desert is guarded, but
it lies like a dark, vast continent behind a dimly visible shore, and he
dwells within the shadowy rim of a night that yields no ray to tell of
his origin. He is a true pagan, swathed in seemingly dense clouds of
superstition, rich in fanciful legend, and profoundly ceremonious in
religion. His gods are innumerable. Not even the ancient Greeks
possessed a more populous Olympus. On that austere yet familiar height,
gods of peace and of war, of the chase, of bountiful harvest and of
famine, of sun and rain and snow, elbow a thousand others for standing
room. The trail of the serpent has crossed his history, too, and he
frets his pottery with an imitation of its scales, and gives the
rattlesnake a prominent place among his deities. Unmistakably a pagan,
yet the purity and well being of his communities will bear favorable
comparison with those of the enlightened world.

He is brave, honest and enterprising within the fixed limits of his
little sphere; his wife is virtuous, his children are docile. And were
the whole earth swept bare of every living thing, save for a few leagues
surrounding his tribal home, his life would show no manner of
disturbance. Probably he might never hear of so unimportant an event. He
would still alternately labor and relax in festive games, still
reverence his gods and rear his children to a life of industry and
content, so anomalous is he, so firmly established in an absolute
independence.

Pueblo architecture possesses none of the elaborate ornamentation found
in the Aztec ruins in Mexico. The exterior of the house is absolutely
plain. It is sometimes seven stories in height and contains over a
thousand rooms. In some instances it is built of adobe--blocks of mud
mixed with straw and dried in the sun, and in others, of stone covered
with mud cement. The entrance is by means of a ladder, and when that is
pulled up the latch-string is considered withdrawn.

The pueblo of pueblos is Acoma, a city without a peer. It is built upon
the summit of a table-rock, with overhanging, e