ee the site of the old Spanish
Gareta prison, in the walls of which bullets were found embedded in
human hair. And if you want a little Versailles of retreat away from the
braying of the burros and of the humans, away from the dust of street
and of small talk--then of a May day when the orchard is in bloom and
the air alive with the song of the bees, go to the old French garden of
the late Bishop Lamy! Through the cobwebby spring foliage shines the
gleam of the snowy peaks; and the air is full of dreams precious as the
apple bloom.

What was the other charge? Oh, yes--"lacks the human," whatever that
means. Why are legends of border forays in Scotland more thrilling than
true tales of robber dens in Horse-Thief Canyon and the cliff houses of
Flagstaff and the Frijoles, where renegades of the Civil War used to
hide? Why are the multi-colored peasant workers of Brittany or Belgium
more interesting than the gayly dressed peons of New Mexico, or the
Navajo boys scouring up and down the sandy arroyos? Why is the story of
Jack Cade any more "human" than the tragedy of the three Vermont boys,
Stott, Scott and Wilson, hanged in the Tonto Basin for horses they did
not steal in order that their assassins might pocket $5,000 of money
which the young fellows had brought out from the East with them? Why are
not all these personages of good repute and ill repute as famous to
American folklore hunters as Robin Hood or any other legendary heroes of
the Old World?

Driven to the last redoubt, your protagonist for Europe against America
usually assumes the air of superiority supposed to be the peculiar
prerogative of the gods of Olympus, and declares: "Yes--but America
lacks the history and the art of the old associations in Europe."

"Lacks history?" Go back fifty years in our own West to the transition
period from fur trade to frontier, from Spanish don living in idle
baronial splendor to smart Yankeedom invading the old exclusive domain
in cowhide boots! Go back another fifty years! You are in the midst of
American feudalism--fur lords of the wilderness ruling domains the area
of a Europe, Spanish Conquistadores marching through the desert heat
clad _cap-a-pie_ in burnished mail; Governor Prince's collection at
Santa Fe has one of those cuirasses dug up in New Mexico with the bullet
hole through the metal right above the heart. Another fifty years
back--and the century war for a continent with the Indians, the downing
of the old ci