Don Anabel Lopez was proud of his station in the secure and far-flung territory of New Spain which his forbears had first found and conquered nearly three centuries before his time. He claimed descent straight from a Spanish grandee who had accompanied the expedition of settlement of Juan de Oñate in the latter part of the sixteenth century. Don Anabel felt that the riches of this vast territory belonged rightfully to those who had held it through so many generations for the glory of the Spanish crown, which at last, in this year of grace 1828, had been thrown off through a treaty of independence with her colony, Mexico. Don Anabel’s sheep grazed over a range of a hundred miles. The unnumbered buffalo were his cattle; his slaves the peons that lived upon the extensive lands granted his grandsires. To Don Anabel’s warehouses the Indians brought the pelts of beaver, lynx, fox, the hides and robes of buffalo and deer. These he exchanged with the great fur-traders of the north at a profit that would have made them wince, had they known that he himself had acquired them for a handful of tawdry merchandise and home-distilled liquors. Every six months his caravan of burros labored up the Cordilleras from the City of Mexico, bringing all manner of merchandise for the people and for the aristocrats of New Spain. Always there were luxuries brought from Spain and from the far markets of the earth. The Mexican hidalgos prided themselves on having none but imported furniture in their establishments, but Don Anabel considered this an affectation, as it was obviously impossible for the dons of New Mexico. Don Anabel was proud of living in a way that his Spanish forbears might have lived in that Old Spain which was so like this New Spain. His great adobe hacienda might have been considered only a vast mud house by the European, but it covered nearly an acre of ground. The patio within was fifty feet square, and if the inner walls were whitewashed instead of carved and paneled in fine woods, yet they were hung with brocades and strangely beautiful fabrics now no longer woven, which were made from the silken hair of Peruvian llamas or spun from some flax-like Mexican plant. The carved furniture had a rude and florid beauty that was mediæval, and, like the native Aztec lords of Mexico, the proud Montezumas, Don Anabel’s table was served with dishes of purest silver only.