le of the American Colony in Paris. His books have
"gone off" like hot cross buns. Before, they were broad. Now they are
abroad; and, like the tourist tickets, they are selling two to one.

The stock excuse among foreign poseurs for the two to one preference of
Europe to America is that "America lacks the picturesque, the human, the
historic." A straightforward falsehood you can always answer; but an
implied falsehood masking behind knowledge, which is a vacuum, and
superiority, which is pretense--is another matter. Let us take the dire
and damning deficiencies of America!

"America lacks the picturesque." Did the ancient dwelling of the Stone
Age sound to you as if it lacked the picturesque? I could direct you to
fifty such picturesque spots in the Southwest alone.

There is the Enchanted Mesa, with its sister mesa of Acoma--islands of
rock, sheer precipice of yellow _tufa_ for hundreds of feet--amid the
Desert sand, light shimmering like a stage curtain, herds exaggerated
in huge, grotesque mirage against the lavender light, and Indian riders,
brightly clad and picturesque as Arabs, scouring across the plain; all
this reachable two hours' drive from a main railroad. Or there are the
three Mesas of the Painted Desert, cities on the flat mountain table
lands, ancient as the Aztecs, overlooking such a roll of mountain and
desert and forest as the Tempter could not show beneath the temple. Or,
there is the White House, an ancient ruin of Canyon de Chelly (Shay)
forty miles from Fort Defiance, where you could put a dozen White Houses
of Washington.

"But," your European protagonist declares, "I don't mean the ancient and
the primeval. I mean the modern peopled hamlet type." All right! What is
the matter with Santa Fe? Draw a circle from New Orleans up through
Santa Fe to Santa Barbara, California; and you'll find old missions
galore, countless old towns of which Santa Fe, with its twin-towered
Cathedral and old San Miguel Church, is a type. Santa Fe, itself, is a
bit of old Spain set down in mosaic in hustling, bustling America. There
is the Governor's Palace, where three different nations have held sway;
and there is the Plaza, where the burros trot to market under loads of
wood picturesque as any donkeys in Spain; and there is the old Exchange
Hotel, the end of the Santa Fe Trail, where Stephen B. Elkins came in
cowhide boots forty years ago to carve out a colossal fortune. At one
end of a main thoroughfare, you can s