The hub of the city is the Plaza—warm and sunny in winter, shady and cool in summer. Seated here on a bench you soon arrive at a lazy man’s notion of the sort of place you are in. Here the donkeys patter by laden with firewood—dearest of Santa Fe’s street pictures; here Mexican peddlers of apples and _dulces_, _piñones_ and shoe-strings ply their mild trade, and Tesuque Indians, with black hair bound about with scarlet _bandas_, pass by to the trader’s, their blankets bulging with native pottery, or, in season, their wagons loaded with melons, grapes, apples, and peaches. Of afternoons the newsboys loiter about crying the papers, and you have a choice of your news in English or Spanish; and on Sundays and holidays the band plays athletically in its little kiosk, the crowd promenading around and around the while very much as in Old Mexico, and strewing the ground behind it with piñon and peanut shells. Close to the Plaza, too, cluster many of the historied spots of Santa Fe; indeed, the Plaza itself is a chief one. On this bit of ground it is confidently believed that Oñate must have camped in 1605—if it was 1605—when the capital was transferred from San Gabriel; and there is no doubt whatever that here was the seething center of the famous Pueblo revolt of 1680, when 3000 infuriated Indians cooped the entire Spanish population of Santa Fe within the Governor’s Palace opposite, and kept them there for a week. Then the whites made a brave sortie, caught and hanged 50 Indians in the Plaza and escaped to Old Mexico—their exit being celebrated shortly afterwards in this same Plaza by the Indians’ making a bonfire of all Spanish archives and church belongings they could lay hands on. Here 13 years later came De Vargas, the re-conqueror of New Mexico (bearing it is said the very standard under which Oñate had marched in the original conquest), and with his soldiers knelt before the reinstated cross. And it was in this Plaza in 1846, during our Mexican War, that General Stephen Kearny ran up the Stars and Stripes and took possession of the territory in the name of the United States. It was the Plaza, too, that formed the western terminus of the Old Santa Fe Trail—that famous highway of trade that bound New Mexico with Anglo-Saxondom throughout the Mexican regime in the Southwest and until the iron horse and Pullman cars superseded mules and Conestoga wagons. At the old adobe hotel known as La Fonda, a remnant of which still stands at this writing just across from the southeast corner of the Plaza, travelers and teamsters, plainsmen and trappers found during half a century that boisterous brand of cheer dear to the pioneer soul—cheer made up quite largely of cards, _aguardiente_ and the freedom of firearms, but gone now, let us trust, out of the world forever since the world has lost its frontiers.