It is late September. A parrot calls out in Spanish from the center of the patio where our rooms look out on an arcade running round the court in a perfect square. A mocking-bird trills saucily from his cage amid the cosmos bloom. Donkeys and burros amble past the rear gate with loads of wood strapped to their backs. Your back window looks out on the courtyard. Your front window faces the street across from a plaza, or city square. Stalwart, thick-set, muscular figures, hair banded back by red and white scarfs, trousers of a loose, white pantaloon sort, tunic a gray or white blanket, wrapped Arab fashion from shoulders to waist, stalk with quick, nervous tread along the plaza; for it is the feast of Saint Geronimo presently. The whole town is in festal attire. There will be dancing all night and all day, and rude theatricals, and horse and foot races; and the plaza is agog with sightseers. No, it is not Persia; and it is not Palestine; and it is not Spain. It is just plain, commonplace America out at Taos--white man's Taos, at the old Columbia Hotel, which is the last of the old-time Spanish inns. As you motor into the town, the long rows of great cottonwoods and poplars attest the great age of the place. Through windows deep set in adobe casement and flush with the street, you catch glimpses of inner patios where oleanders and roses are still in bloom. Then you see the roof windows of artists' studios, and find yourself not only in an old Spanish town but in the midst of a modern art colony, which has been called into being by the unique coloring, form and antiquity of life in the Southwest. A few years ago, when Lungren and Philips and Sharpe and a dozen others began portraying the marvelous coloring of the Southwestern Desert with its almost Arab life, the public refused to accept such spectacular, un-American work as true. Such pictures were diligently "skied" by hanging committees, and a few hundred dollars was deemed a good price. To-day, Southwestern art forms a school by itself; and where commissions used to go begging at hundreds of dollars, they to-day command prices of thousands and tens of thousands. When I was in Taos, one artist was filling commissions for an Eastern collector that would mount up to prices paid for the best work of Watts and Whistler. It is a brutal way to put art in terms of the dollar bill; but it is sometimes the only way to make a people realize there are prophets in our own country.