y as soft as the velvet blue of a pansy for roof,
and the stars will swing down so close in the rare, clear Desert air
that you will think you can reach up a hand and pluck the lights like
jack-o'-lanterns. Because you are in the Desert, don't delude yourself
into thinking you'll not need warm night covering. It may be as hot at
midday as a blast out of a furnace, though the heat is never stifling;
but the altitude of the various mesas you will cross varies from 6,000
to 9,000 feet, and the night will be as chilly as if you were camped in
the Canadian Northwest.

Up to the present, the Mission of St. Michael's, Day's Ranch, and Mr.
Hubbell's almost regal hospitality, have been open to all comers
crossing the Desert--open without cost or price. In fact, if you offered
money for the kindness you receive, it would be regarded as an insult.
It is a type of the old-time baronial Spanish hospitality, when no door
was locked and every comer was welcomed to the festive board, and if you
expressed admiration for jewel, or silver-work, or old mantilla, it was
presented to you by the lord of the manor with the simple and absolutely
sincere words, "It is yours," which scrubs and bubs and dubs and scum
and cockney were apt to take greedily and literally, with no sense of
the _noblesse oblige_ which binds recipient as it binds donor to a code
of honor not put in words. It is a type of hospitality that has all but
vanished from this sordid earth; and it is a type, I am sorry to write,
ill-suited to an age when the Quantity travel quite as much as the
Quality. For instance, everyone who has crossed the Painted Desert knows
that Lorenzo Hubbell, who is commonly called the King of Northern
Arizona, has yearly spent thousands, tens of thousands, entertaining
passing strangers, whom he has never seen before and will never see
again, who come unannounced and stay unurged and depart reluctantly. In
the old days, when your Spanish grandee entertained only his peers, this
was well; but to-day--well, it may work out in Goldsmith's comedy, where
the two travelers mistake a mansion for an inn. But where the arrivals
come in relays of from one to a dozen a month, and issue orders as to
hot water and breakfast and dinner and supper and depart tardily as a
dead-beat from a city lodging house and break out in complaints and
sometimes afterwards break out in patronizing print, it is time for the
Mission and Day's Ranch and Mr. Hubbell's trading posts t