gh to resist trampling, and thousands of acres are
growing up to seedling yellow pines as regular and thrifty as if set out
by nurserymen. In all, the Pecos Forest includes some 750,000 acres; and
in addition to natural seeding, the Forest men are yearly harrowing in
five or six hundred acres of yellow pine; so that in twenty-five years
this Forest is likely to be more densely wooded than in its primeval
state.

The train dumps you off at Glorieta, a little adobe Mexican town hedged
in by the arid foothills, with ten-acre farm patches along the valley
stream, of wonderfully rich soil, every acre under the ditch, a homemade
system of irrigation which dates back to Indian days when the Spanish
first came in the fifteen hundreds and found the same little
checkerboard farm patches under the same primitive ditch system. A
glance tells you that nearly all these peon farms are goat ranches. The
goats scrabble up over the hills; and on the valley fields the farmer
raises corn and oats enough to support his family and his stock. We, in
the East, who pay from $175 to $250 for a horse, and twenty to thirty
cents a pound for our meat, open our eyes wide with wonder when we learn
that horses can still be bought here for from $35 to $60 and meat at $2
a sheep. To be sure, this means that the peon Mexican farmer does not
wax opulent, but he does not want to wax opulent; $40 or $100 a year
keeps him better than $400 or $1,000 would keep you; and a happier
looking lot of people you never saw than these swarthy descendants of
old Spain still plowing with single horse wooden plows, with nothing
better for a barn than a few sticks stuck up with a wattle roof.

Then suddenly, it dawns on you--this is not America at all. It is a bit
of old Spain picked up three centuries ago and set down here in the
wilderness of New Mexico, with a sprinkling of outsiders seeking health,
and a sprinkling of nondescripts seeking doors in and out of mischief.
The children in bright red and blue prints playing out squat in the
fresh-plowed furrows, the women with red shawls over heads, brighter
skirts tucked up, sprawling round the adobe house doorways, the goats
bleating on the red sand hills--all complete the illusion that you have
waked up in some picturesque nook of old Spain. What Quebec is to
Canada, New Mexico is to the United States--a mosaic in color; a bit of
the Old World set down in the New; a relic of the historic and the
picturesque not yet sandp