the feast of
Saint Geronimo presently. The whole town is in festal attire. There will
be dancing all night and all day, and rude theatricals, and horse and
foot races; and the plaza is agog with sightseers. No, it is not Persia;
and it is not Palestine; and it is not Spain. It is just plain,
commonplace America out at Taos--white man's Taos, at the old Columbia
Hotel, which is the last of the old-time Spanish inns.

As you motor into the town, the long rows of great cottonwoods and
poplars attest the great age of the place. Through windows deep set in
adobe casement and flush with the street, you catch glimpses of inner
patios where oleanders and roses are still in bloom. Then you see the
roof windows of artists' studios, and find yourself not only in an old
Spanish town but in the midst of a modern art colony, which has been
called into being by the unique coloring, form and antiquity of life in
the Southwest. A few years ago, when Lungren and Philips and Sharpe and
a dozen others began portraying the marvelous coloring of the
Southwestern Desert with its almost Arab life, the public refused to
accept such spectacular, un-American work as true. Such pictures were
diligently "skied" by hanging committees, and a few hundred dollars was
deemed a good price. To-day, Southwestern art forms a school by itself;
and where commissions used to go begging at hundreds of dollars, they
to-day command prices of thousands and tens of thousands. When I was in
Taos, one artist was filling commissions for an Eastern collector that
would mount up to prices paid for the best work of Watts and Whistler.
It is a brutal way to put art in terms of the dollar bill; but it is
sometimes the only way to make a people realize there are prophets in
our own country.

Columbia Hotel is really one of the famous old Spanish mansions
occupying almost the entire side of a plaza square. From its street
entrance, you can see down the little alleyed street where dwelt Kit
Carson in the old days. His old home is almost a wreck to-day, and there
does not seem to be the slightest movement to convert it into a shrine
where the hundreds of sightseers who come to the Indian dances could
brush up memories of old frontier heroes. There are really only four
streets in Taos, all facing the Plaza or town square. Other streets are
alleys running off these, and when you see a notary's sign out as
"alcalde," it does not seem so very far back to the days when Spanish
do