think, many hundreds of these ruins in the Piedras Verdes region, most of them merely mounds suggestive of what they once were. Ancient ditches could also be plainly made out along the hillsides, showing that the former inhabitants cultivated the rich soil of the valleys. They well understood the value of water, too, for around the bases of the small, streamless valleys leading into the watered ones were damlike terraces, evidently designed to catch and retain the water after showers until it was needed in the irrigating ditches. On the top of high hills adjacent were fortified places, apparently where they must have fled in times of danger from other tribes. They were a wonderful and interesting people, one that would repay careful study, even from the little evidence of their existence that is left. [Illustration: ANCIENT JAR UNEARTHED AT JUAREZ CITY.] On the Tapasita we came upon the ruins of what must have been a large city of these people--the largest we saw in that part of the country. The only life we saw there was a mountain lion or panther, that came trotting along the valley until it saw us, when it turned back into the mountains. Truly the wild beasts were wandering over the Toltec Babylon. It is impossible for an artist to convey in plain black and white any idea of the beauty of this country; it is a land requiring the painter to exhibit its beauties. One of the interesting peculiarities of the numerous ruins found throughout this portion of the country, and that indicates a once dense population living off the soil, is the way in which most of them seem to have met their fate. When a ruined house is dug into all the skeletons of its occupants are found in what may be termed the combined kitchen and eating room,--these two rooms being in one,--and always near a fireplace. The postures of these skeletons are as various as it is possible for the human body to assume. They are found kneeling, stretched out, sometimes with their locked hands over their heads, on their sides, and, again, with their children in their arms, hardly any two being alike in the same house or series of houses, where they were united into a pueblo. Now in the whole study of sepulture it has been almost universally found that even among the lowest savages as well as among the most civilized peoples, whatever form of burial is adopted, no matter how absurd from our point of view, it is uniform in the main points, allowing, of course, slight deviations for caste or rank. The positions of the skeletons in their own houses do not accord with this general fact, and have led some to believe that this race was destroyed by an earthquake or other violent action of nature.