Just why I should have chosen to visit Ganado at this precise time is inexplicable, but there is no mystery in my leaving Chicago. My future sister-in-law bluntly informed me that my absence from the city would greatly facilitate the necessary dressmaking. Although an obtuse person in some ways, I know when I am bumped. Three days after Fuller's luncheon to Howells, I reached the town of Gallup, which is the point of departure for the Navajo Agency, some twenty-five or thirty miles north of the Santa Fe railway. For nearly ten years I had been going to the Rocky Mountains at least once during the summer season, and it is probable that I felt the need of something to offset the impressions of my tour in England and France--to lose touch with my material even for twelve months was to be cheated--then, too, I hoped in this way to shorten the weeks of waiting. Anyhow, here I was in Gallup, a drab little town which would have been a horror to my bride-elect. One of the reasons for my being in New Mexico I am sure about. With the prospect of having some sort of an apartment in the city and a cabin at the camp, I was in the market for Navajo rugs, and silver, and Hopi pottery. It was in pursuit of these (and of literary material) that I mounted the stage the next morning and set off up the sun-lit valley to the north. In leaving Gallup behind, my spirits rose. I wished that Zulime might have shared this strange landscape with me. On the right a distant, dimly-blue wall of mountains ran, while to the west rolled high, treeless hills, against which an occasional native hut showed like a wolf's den, half-hid among dwarf pinon trees and surrounded by naked children and savage dogs. At intervals we came upon solitary shepherds tending their piebald flocks, as David and Abner guarded their father's sheep in Judea. That these patient shepherds, watching their lean herds, these Deborahs weaving their bright blankets beneath gnarled branches of sparse cedar trees, should be living less than forty-eight hours from Chicago, was incredible, and yet here they were! Their life and landscape, though of a texture with that of Arabia, were as real as Illinois, and every mile carried me deeper into the silence and serenity of their tribal home. Brown boys, belted with silver and wearing shirts of gay calico, met us, riding their wiry little ponies with easy grace. Children, naked, shy as foxes, arrested their play beside dry clumps of sage-brush and stared in solemn row, whilst their wrinkled, leathery grand-sires hobbled out, cupping their thin brown hands in prayer for tobacco.