One evening at sunset at a place where the ditch banks burgeoned with flowering locust and the bird-of-paradise tree, Steven came to a low rambling ranch house whose stoutly pillared portal was framed in sweet clematis. The place was like an oasis. He had trotted his weary little mare over many a dusty mile across a sandy arid mesa. It was with relief that he dismounted and took water from a gourd offered by a young girl whose dark beauty was like a madonna’s. There was no wife in the house, but the father, a grave, silent man, appeared in the door and offered his house to the strange blond traveler, questioning neither his name nor his race, his destination nor his business. An older brother to the girl came up to take Steven’s horse. He was dark and silent, too, like the father, with a sharp, suspicious gleam in his eye. As they talked, a fraile, or friar, in the habit of a Franciscan, emerged from a wing of the house and joined them with an easy, merry flow of talk. The fraile was fat and, though well robed, was illy groomed, unshaven, and therefore unpleasant to Steven. Yet in spite of a certain grossness the prelate had charm, wit that was most welcome. When Steven had been shown to a room and had washed away the dust of travel he went outside again and sat with the men beneath the paradise trees, where the fraile talked of many things and held his listeners’ attention undiverted. Fray Bartolomeo had been for a number of years in Albuquerque, but he had been recalled, _gracias a Dios_, and was going back to his beloved Mexico. Fray Bartolomeo rubbed his hands with unaffected gusto when the _mosa_ came calling them to dinner. This was but a farmer’s house, not that of a poor peon by any means, but a prosperous ranchero, who was called “Don” by his neighbors and servants, but who was not of the Spanish hidalgos, nor made pretense of being. There was plenty of the foods to which Steven had already become accustomed in New Mexico, but of which he had not eaten in a week, for the poor and the shiftless had little but beans and chili, and night had brought him only to such places heretofore. Here was melon such as he had never known surpassed, soup of strange herbs and greens, filled with balls of finely ground meat rich with chili and mutton fat. There were squashes baked in the outdoor _estufas_, rich and mealy, and little cakes made of corn flour and covered with white honey and chopped piñon nuts.