There have been missionaries elsewhere whose flocks were as long ungrateful and murderous, but few if any who were more out of the world. New Mexico has been for three hundred and fifty years, and is to-day, largely a wilderness, threaded with a few slender oases. To people of the Eastern States a desert seems very far off; but there are hundreds of thousands of square miles in our own Southwest to this day where the traveller is very likely to die of thirst, and where poor wretches every year do perish by that most awful of deaths. Even now there is no trouble in finding hardship and danger in New Mexico; and once it was one of the cruellest wildernesses conceivable. Scarce a decade has gone by since an end was put to the Indian wars and harassments, which had lasted continuously for more than three centuries. When Spanish colonist or Spanish missionary turned his back on Old Mexico to traverse the thousand-mile, roadless desert to New Mexico, he took his life in his hands; and every day in that savage province he was in equal danger. If he escaped death by thirst or starvation by the way, if the party was not wiped out by the merciless Apache, then he settled in the wilderness as far from any other home of white men as Chicago is from Boston. If a missionary, he was generally alone with a flock of hundreds of cruel savages; if a soldier or a farmer, he had from two hundred to fifteen hundred friends in an area as big as New England, New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio combined, in the very midst of a hundred thousand swarthy foes whose war-whoop he was likely to hear at any moment, and never had long chance to forget. He came poor, and that niggard land never made him rich. Even in the beginning of this century, when some began to have large flocks of sheep, they were often left penniless by one night's raid of Apaches or Navajos. Such was New Mexico when the missionaries came, and very nearly such it remained for more than three hundred years. If the most enlightened and hopeful mind in the Old World could have looked across to that arid land, it would never have dreamed that soon the desert was to be dotted with churches,--and not little log or mud chapels, but massive stone masonries whose ruins stand to-day, the noblest in our North America. But so it was; neither wilderness nor savage could balk that great zeal.