an burro trotting to market loaded
out of sight under a wood pile; Old Spain and New America; streets with
less system and order about them than an ant hill, with a modern Woman's
Board of Trade that will make you mind your P's and Q's and toe the
sanitary scratch if you are apt to be slack; the chimes, and chimes and
chimes yet again of old Catholic churches right across from a Wild West
Show where a throaty band is screeching Yankee-Doodle; little adobe
houses where I never quite know whether I am entering by the front door
or the back; the Palace where Lew Wallace wrote Ben Hur, and eighty
governors of three different nationalities preceded him, and where the
Archaeological Society has its rooms with Lotave's beautiful mural
paintings of the Cliff Dwellers, and where the Historical Society has
neither room nor money enough to do what it ought in a region that is
such a mine of history. Such is Santa Fe; the only bit of Europe set
down in America; I venture to say the only picturesque spot in America,
yet undiscovered by the jaded globe-trotter.

[Illustration: Above this entrance to a cliff dwelling in the Jemez
Forest are drawings by the prehistoric inhabitants]

Second, I want to put on record that Santa Fe should be black ashamed of
itself for hiding its light under a bushel. Ask a Santa Fe man why in
the world, with all its attraction of the picturesque, the antique, the
snowy mountains, and the weak-lunged one's ideal climate, it has so few
tourists; and he answers you with a depreciatory shrug that "it's off
the main line." "Off the main line?" So is Quebec off the main line; yet
200,000 Americans a year see it. So is Yosemite off the main line; and
10,000 people go out to it every year. I have never heard that the Nile
and the Pyramids and the Sphinx were on the main line; yet foreigners
yearly reap a fortune catering to visiting Americans. Personally, it is
a delight to me to visit a place untrodden by the jaded globe-trotter,
for I am one myself; but whether it is laziness that prevents Santa Fe
blowing its own horn, or the old exclusive air bequeathed to it by the
grand dons of Spain that is averse to sounding the brass band, I love
the appealing, picturesque, inert laziness of it all; but I love better
to ask: "Why go to Egypt, when you have the wonders of an Egypt
unexplored in your own land? Why scour the crowded Alps when the snowy
domes of the Santa Fe and Jemez and Sangre de Christo lie unexplored
on