It is from Isleta that many of the pottery makers come whom you see offering their wares on the railway platform at Albuquerque, and a pleasant day may be put in rambling about the streets of the pueblo, chatting and trafficking with the hospitable people, who are a very wide-awake, independent sort of Indians. You may go thither by train; or you may drive (a much better way), following the west bank of the Rio Grande, and enjoying the beauty of a typical bit of rural New Mexico, now austere and sun-scorched, now relenting in vineyards, fields of corn and lush alfalfa, and orchards of apple and peach, sandwiched between sleepy little Mexican villages smothered in trees and old-fashioned flowers. Much of New Mexico is as foreign in aspect as Spain, and the flat-roofed, eaveless ranch houses, low and rambling, with enclosed plazitas, and high-walled corrals adjoining, into which the teams are driven at night and the gates shut to the outer world, bring to you the atmosphere of Don Quixote or Lazarillo de Tormes. Architecturally, Isleta differs widely from the orthodox pueblo type, its houses being usually of one story and extended over a liberal area, as must needs be to shelter its thousand or so of people. They are quite up-to-date farmers, these Isleteños, and the pueblo is as busy at harvest time as a beehive, what with fruit drying, corn husking, and alfalfa baling.[19] Their homes are generally neatly kept, often adorned within with bright-colored blankets, pretty water ollas, and the whitewashed walls hung with pictures of Virgin and saints—impressing you as homes of a thrifty and well-doing race. Indeed these people are reputed the richest of all the Pueblos. It is, I believe, a matter of record that in 1862, when a detachment of the United States army was stranded penniless in New Mexico, an Isleta Indian loaned it $18,000 cash, simply taking the commander’s receipt as evidence. After waiting patiently for twelve years for the government to have the politeness to return the money without being asked for it, and hearing nothing, he and the governor of Isleta, accompanied by the local United States Indian agent, made a trip to Washington to see about it. Through the personal interest of President Grant, the money was at last returned.