ation, but he preferred to
wait until he had seen enough so that he could ask his questions more
intelligently. So he kept relatively still, but his eyes did not cease
from observing.

As the trip progressed, and the jumps between towns became longer, the
young salesman had time to see a good deal. In the far Southwest he
became aware that the increasingly numerous Mexican population was no
longer a matter of box-car dwellers, more or less migratory. It was a
settled people. Its little adobe villages, queer and quaint as they
seemed to Middle-Western eyes, were centers of established life. And he
discovered that in these villages always one building overshadowed all
the rest.

One day as they were headed towards El Paso he ventured to mention this
to his traveling companion. "Seems to me," he said, "that none of these
little mud villages is too poor to have a church, and mostly a pretty
good church too. How do they manage it?"

Now Finch was no student of church life, but he did know a little about
the country. "That's the way it is all over this Southwest, my boy, and
across the line in Old Mexico it's a good deal more so. My guess is that
the churches and the priests began by teaching the people that whatever
else happened they had to put up for the church, and from what I've
noticed I reckon that now nothing else matters much to the church. It
has become a kind of poor relation that's got to be fed and helped,
whether it amounts to anything or not. But it's a long way from being as
humble and thankful as you would naturally expect a poor relation to
be."

During the El Paso layover the two of them took a day across the
International Bridge. J.W. had watched the Mexicans coming over, and he
wanted to see the country they came from.

"You'll not see much over there," a friendly spoken customs official
told him. "It's a pretty poor section of desert 'round about these
parts. You ought to get away down into the heart of the country."

"Yes, I suppose so," J.W. responded, "but there isn't time on this trip.
Are such people as these coming over to the United States right along?"

"I should say they are," said the man of authority with emphasis. "In
the last four or five years the Mexican population of the United States
has about doubled; three quarters of a million have crossed the Rio
Grande somewhere, or the border further west. You people from the East
make a big fuss over immigration from Europe, but you hardly