How like a _fata morgana_ it looks when you first see it in this enchanted atmosphere: the intensely blue sky overhead, the plain about it covered with sparse grass and fantastic cactus, that hide the sand and make the earth look verdant; the low, white dome and the picturesque buildings clustering about it; the _adobe_ garden-walls, with arched gateways, sometimes whitened, sometimes left in their native mud color, toned down by age and the glare of the sun; a tall mesquite-tree or a group of cotton-woods striving heavenward from among the _adobe_ houses; Saddle Mountain, with its ever-changing tints and its strong lights and shades in the far distance, and Sugar-loaf or Sentinel Hill to the immediate left. On the plain between town and the Sugar-loaf, the ruins of what, in any other country, I should pronounce to have been a monastery, lift themselves from the fresh, dewy green--venerable, gray, and stately--some wild vine creeping stealthily in at the frameless window, and out again at the roofless top. Having purposely avoided a close inspection of this spot, for fear of being compelled to see that the ruins were only coarse mud-walls, standing in a wilderness of hideous sand and clay, flecked with stiff bunch-grass, the contemplation of it, with my mind's eye, is one of the pleasures of memory to me, even at this day. Could I have avoided passing through the streets of Tucson, perhaps I could think of it, too, as a charming and delightful place. There are gardens down on our left, as we come in from this side, that "blossom as the rose," and are overshadowed by just such beautiful, waving trees as we see in among the houses yonder; and, from these "indications," we are justified in supposing that we will find _parterres_ of flowers in the gardens surrounded by those high walls. But we have forgotten to take into account that a stream of water flows along those fields; that gardens don't flourish here without water, and that water in the town can only be had by digging deep down into the hard ground.