I had to ford the little river, shoes and stockings in hand, to reach Santuario, and was not sure when I got there. An old _paisano_, sitting in the shade of a wall, informed me, however, that the little cluster of adobes on a hillside, into which I soon came from the river, was really the place—“of great fame, señor. Here come people of all nations to be cured—Mexicans, Americans, Apaches—from far, very far.” The adobe church, half hidden behind some huge cottonwoods, was open—of crude construction without and within, but very picturesque. Passing within the wooden doors, which are curiously carved with a maze of lettering that I found it impossible to decipher, I was in a twilight faintly illumined by the shining of many candles set upon the floor in front of a gaudy altar. Upon the walls hung beskirted figures of saints in various colors and wearing tin crowns. There were, too, crude little shrines upon which pilgrims had scrawled their names. A figure of San Diego on horseback with a quirt on his wrist, cowboy style, was particularly lively, I thought. In a room adjoining the altar is a hole from which pilgrims take handfuls of earth—red adobe, apparently—the outward instrumentality that is depended upon for the cures. The history of this queer chapel is interesting. Long before it was built the efficacy of that hole of earth was believed far and wide, and the place resorted to by health seekers. Finally in 1816 a pious _paisano_ named Bernardo Abeyta, who had prospered greatly in his affairs, was impelled to erect this church as a testimony of gratitude to God. Dying he bequeathed it to Doña Carmen Chaves, his daughter, who kept for all comers the church and its pit of healing, and lived in a modest way upon the fees which grateful pilgrims bestowed upon her. After her death, the property descended to her daughter, who maintains it in the same way. It is said the fame of the spot is known even in old Mexico, whence pilgrims sometimes come.[17] The earth is utilized either internally dissolved in water, or outwardly made into a mud wash and rubbed on the body. The chapel is dedicated to _El Señor de Esquipulas_—the Christ of Esquipulas—Esquipulas being a little village of Guatemala whose great church enshrines a famous image of the Lord believed to perform miraculous cures. For a glimpse in small compass of the unsuspected picturesqueness of rural New Mexico, I know of nothing better than this little jaunt from Española to Santuario.