g yellow pine
pillars supporting the arcade above the public walk, each pillar
surmounted by the fluted architrave peculiar to Spanish-Moorish
architecture. It is yellow adobe in the sunlight--very old, very sleepy,
very remote from latter-day life, the most un-American thing in all
America, the only governor's palace from Athabasca to the Gulf of
Mexico, from Sitka to St. Lawrence, that exists to-day precisely as it
existed one hundred years ago, two hundred years ago, three hundred
years ago, four hundred years ago--back, back beyond that to the days
when there were no white men in America. Uncover the outer plaster in
the six-foot thickness of the walls in the Governor's Palace of Santa
Fe, and what do you find? Solid adobe and brick? Not much! The
walled-up, conical fireplaces and meal bins and corn caves of a pueblo
people who lived on the site of modern Santa Fe hundreds of years before
the Spanish founded this capital here in 1605. For years it has been a
dispute among historians--Bandelier, Hodge, Twitchell, Governor Prince,
Mr. Reed--whether any prehistoric race dwelt where Santa Fe now stands.
Only in the summer of 1912, when it was necessary to replace some old
beams and cut some arches through the six-foot walls was it discovered
that the huge partitions covered in their centers walls antedating the
coming of the Spaniards--walls with the little conical fireplaces of
Indian pueblos, with such meal bins and corn shelves as you find in the
prehistoric cave dwellings.

We have such a passion for destroying the old and replacing it with the
new in America that you can scarcely place your hand on a structure in
the New World that stands intact as it was before the Revolution. We
somehow or other take it for granted that these mute witnesses of
ancient heroism have nothing to teach us with their mossed walls and
low-beamed ceilings and dumb, majestic dignity.

[Illustration: The Governor's Palace at Santa Fe, New Mexico, within the
walls of which are found the conical fireplaces of the Indians who lived
here hundreds of years before the Spaniards came]

To this, the Governor's Palace of Santa Fe is the one and complete
exception in America. It flanks the cottonwoods of the Plaza, yellow
adobe in the sunlight--very old, very sleepy, very remote from
latter-day life, but with a quaint, quiet atmosphere that travelers
scour Europe to find. Look up to the _vigas_, or beams of the ceiling,
yellowed and browned and m