Of the villages strewn along this delightful way, some are hamlets of half a dozen straggling little adobes drowsing under their rustling cottonwoods. Others are more important. One particularly I remember—Santo Niño. That means “village of the Holy Child,” and His peace that placid morning seemed to rest upon it. The streets were narrow shady lanes, where irrigation ditches running full made a murmuring music, flowing now by adobe walls, now by picket fences where hollyhocks and marigolds and morning-glories looked pleasantly out. It was a village not of houses merely, but of comfortable old orchards, too, and riotous gardens where corn and beans, chilis and melons locked elbows in happy comradery. I think every one I met was Mexican—the women in sombre black rebosos, the men more or less unkempt and bandit-appearing in ample-crowned sombreros, yet almost without exception offering me the courtesy of a raised hand and a _buenos dias, señor_. Santa Cruz de la Cañada—another of these villages—deserves a special word of mention, for next to Santa Fe it is the oldest officially established _villa_ (a form of Spanish organized town), in New Mexico, dating as such from 1695, though in its unincorporated state antedating the Pueblo Rebellion. Long a place of importance, its ancient glory paled as Santa Fe and Albuquerque grew. Today it numbers a scant couple of hundred inhabitants, but it is interesting to the tourist for its fine old church facing the grassy plaza of the village. The church interior is enriched with a number of ancient pictures and carvings of an excellence beyond one’s expectations. Then there is Chímayo, into which you pass just before crossing the river to Santuario. To the general public Chímayo appeals because of its blankets and its apricots, but to me it remains a place of tender memory because of a certain hospitable _tienda de abarrotes_ (or, as we should say, grocery store). Entering it in the hope of finding crackers and cheese, wherewith to make a wayside luncheon, I was given instead a characteristic Mexican meal as exquisitely cooked as ever I had; yet it was but a couple of corn tortillas, a bowl of pink beans done to liquidity, and a cup of black coffee. As to the blankets of Chímayo, they are woven in sizes from a pillow-cover to a bed-spread, of Germantown yarn, and you find them on sale everywhere in the curio shops of the Southwest, competing in a modest way with the Navajo product. The weaving is a fireside industry, prosecuted in the intervals of other work both by women and men, and the bump-bump of the primitive looms is the characteristic melody of the place.