sion walls. These are from three
to five feet thick. The arrows of the natives poured through the
windows. The senor could still see the holes in the pictures, could he
not? Penuelo restored the church in 1710, as could be read by the
inscription carved upon the gallery beam. It would no doubt interest the
senor to know that one of the paintings was by Cimabue, done in 1287,
and that the seven hundred pound bell was cast in Spain during the year
1356 and had been dragged a thousand miles across the deserts of the new
world by the devoted pioneer priests who carried the Cross to the simple
natives of that region.

Gordon went blinking out of the San Miguel mission into a world that
basked indolently in a pleasant glow of sunshine. It seemed to him that
here time had stood still. This impression remained with him during his
tramp back to the hotel. He passed trains of faggot-laden burros, driven
by Mexicans from Tesuque and by Indians from adjoining villages, the
little animals so packed around their bellies with firewood that they
reminded him of caricatures of beruffed Elizabethan dames of the olden
days.

Surely this old town, which seemed to be lying in a peaceful siesta for
centuries unbroken, was an unusual survival from the buried yesterdays
of history. It was hard to believe, for instance, that the Governor's
Palace, a long one-story adobe structure stretching across one entire
side of the plaza, had been the active seat of so much turbulent and
tragic history, that for more than three hundred years it had been
occupied continuously by Spanish, Mexican, Indian, and American
governors. Its walls had echoed the noise of many a bloody siege and
hidden many an execution and assassination. From this building the old
Spanish cavaliers Onate and Vicente de Salivar and Penalosa set out on
their explorations. From it issued the order to execute forty-eight
Pueblo prisoners upon the plaza in front. Governor Armijo had here
penned his defiance to General Kearney, who shortly afterward nailed
upon the flagpole the Stars and Stripes. The famous novel "Ben Hur" was
written in one of these historic rooms.

But the twentieth century had leaned across the bridge of time to shake
hands with the sixteenth. A new statehouse had been built after the
fashion of new Western commonwealths, and the old Palace was now given
over to curio stores and offices. Everywhere the new era compromised
with the old. He passed the office of the law