The train dumps you off at Glorieta, a little adobe Mexican town hedged in by the arid foothills, with ten-acre farm patches along the valley stream, of wonderfully rich soil, every acre under the ditch, a homemade system of irrigation which dates back to Indian days when the Spanish first came in the fifteen hundreds and found the same little checkerboard farm patches under the same primitive ditch system. A glance tells you that nearly all these peon farms are goat ranches. The goats scrabble up over the hills; and on the valley fields the farmer raises corn and oats enough to support his family and his stock. We, in the East, who pay from $175 to $250 for a horse, and twenty to thirty cents a pound for our meat, open our eyes wide with wonder when we learn that horses can still be bought here for from $35 to $60 and meat at $2 a sheep. To be sure, this means that the peon Mexican farmer does not wax opulent, but he does not want to wax opulent; $40 or $100 a year keeps him better than $400 or $1,000 would keep you; and a happier looking lot of people you never saw than these swarthy descendants of old Spain still plowing with single horse wooden plows, with nothing better for a barn than a few sticks stuck up with a wattle roof. Then suddenly, it dawns on you--this is not America at all. It is a bit of old Spain picked up three centuries ago and set down here in the wilderness of New Mexico, with a sprinkling of outsiders seeking health, and a sprinkling of nondescripts seeking doors in and out of mischief. The children in bright red and blue prints playing out squat in the fresh-plowed furrows, the women with red shawls over heads, brighter skirts tucked up, sprawling round the adobe house doorways, the goats bleating on the red sand hills--all complete the illusion that you have waked up in some picturesque nook of old Spain. What Quebec is to Canada, New Mexico is to the United States--a mosaic in color; a bit of the Old World set down in the New; a relic of the historic and the picturesque not yet sandpapered into the commonplace by the friction of progress and democracy. I confess I am glad of it. I am glad there are still two nooks in America where simple folk are happy just to be alive, undisturbed by the "over-weaning ambition that over-vaulteth itself" and falls back in social envy and class hate. "Our people, no, they are not ambish!" said an old Mexican to me. "Dey do not wish wealfth--no--we have dis," pointing to all his own earthly belongings in the little whitewashed adobe room, "and now I will read you a little poem I make on de snow mountains. Hah! Iss not dis good?"