Columbia Hotel is really one of the famous old Spanish mansions occupying almost the entire side of a plaza square. From its street entrance, you can see down the little alleyed street where dwelt Kit Carson in the old days. His old home is almost a wreck to-day, and there does not seem to be the slightest movement to convert it into a shrine where the hundreds of sightseers who come to the Indian dances could brush up memories of old frontier heroes. There are really only four streets in Taos, all facing the Plaza or town square. Other streets are alleys running off these, and when you see a notary's sign out as "alcalde," it does not seem so very far back to the days when Spanish dons lounged round the Plaza wearing silk capes and velvet trousers and buckled shoes, and Spanish _conquistadores_ rode past armed cap-a-pie, and Spanish grand dames stole glances at the outside world through the lattices of the mansion houses. In some of these old Spanish houses, you will find the deep casement windows very high in the wall. I asked a descendant of one of the old Spanish families why that was. "For protection," she said. "Indians?" I asked. "No--Spanish women were not supposed to see, or be seen by, the outside world." The pueblo proper lies about four miles out from the white man's town. Laguna, Acoma, Zuni, the Three Mesas of the Tusayan Desert--all lie on hillsides, or on the very crest of high acclivities. Taos is the exception among purely Indian pueblos. It lies in the lap of the valley among the mountains, two castellated, five story adobe structures, one on each side of a mountain stream. In other pueblo villages, while the houses may adjoin one another like stone fronts in our big cities, they are not like huge beehive apartment houses. In Taos, the houses are practically two great communal dwellings, with each apartment assigned to a special clan or family. In all, some 700 people dwell in these two huge houses. How many rooms are there? Not less than an average of three to each family. Remnants of an ancient adobe wall surround the entire pueblo. A new whitewashed Mission church stands in the center of the village, but you can still see the old one pitted with cannon-ball and bullet, where General Price shelled it in the uprising of the pueblos after American occupation. Men wear store trousers and store hats. You see some modern wagons. Except for these, you are back in the days of Coronado. All the houses can be entered only by ladders that ascend to the roofs and can be drawn up--the pueblo way of bolting the door. The houses run up three, four and five stories. They are adobe color outside, that is to say, a pinkish gray; and whitewashed spotlessly inside. Watch a woman draped in white linen blanket ascending these ladders, and you have to convince yourself that you are not in the Orient. Down by the stream, women with red and blue and white shawls over their heads, and feet encased in white puttees, are washing