If you are in a hurry you may “do” Santa Fe and its immediate environs in a carriage or an automobile in a couple of days, and departing secretly think it a rather overrated little old place. To get into the atmosphere of it, however, you should drop hurry at its gates and make up your mind to spend at least a week there, and longer if you can. Lounge in the Plaza and watch the ebb and flow of the city life that gathers here; drop into the Indian trading stores and get a taste for aboriginal art. White man’s schooling has brought about of late years a decline in the quality of Indian handicraft, but there is still a lot of interest in these Santa Fe curio shops—Navajo and Chímayo blankets, Pueblo pottery, Navajo silver jewelry, Apache baskets, moccasins, bead-work, quaint tobacco pouches, Spanish and Mexican things—_serapes_, _mantillas_, rusty daggers, old silver snuff boxes—and what not. Mount the hill at the city’s northern edge, and sit on the ruined walls of the old _garita_ (where the Mexican customs used to be levied upon imports by the Santa Fe Trail). There you get a magnificent bird’s-eye view of the city in its mountain fastness, and if the day be waning you will have a sunset for your benediction, long to remember. Extend your rambles sometimes to the outskirts for unadvertised sights—the little ranches with their outdoor threshing floors of beaten earth where in August you may see the wheat tramped out by horses, sheep or goats, and winnowed by tossing in the breeze; _paisanas_ washing their linen on stones by the brookside as in Italy or Spain; and the gaunt _descansos_ or crosses of rest, marking stopping places of funerals, and carving in illiterate Spanish scrawled upon the wood, prayers for the repose of departed souls. If you are fortunate enough to have a little Spanish, your enjoyment will be enhanced by stopping at humble doorways for a bit of chat with Juan Bautista the woodchopper, or Maria Rosalía the laundress. You will be civilly welcome, if you yourself are civil, and be handed a chair, if there be one, and will be refreshed to learn something of the essential oneness and kindliness of the human family whether clothed in white skin or brown. It is this pervading air of Old Worldliness that makes the peculiar charm of Santa Fe for the leisurely traveler—its romance and its history are not altogether hidden away in books, but are an obvious part of its living present. Moreover, Santa Fe is the starting point for numerous interesting out-of-town trips. These are story for another chapter.[5] CHAPTER II THE UPPER RIO GRANDE, ITS PUEBLOS AND ITS CLIFF DWELLINGS