New Mexico, it must be remembered, is more Indian and Mexican than American by a proportion of three to one, and includes a sprinkling of negro and Chinese. The Indian lends a touch of the primitive; the Mexican brings Spain into the picture. In doorways painted sky blue or lavender, swarthy women gossip, in mantilla and fringed black shawl. Against a shady wall, in sash and sombrero, all but too lazy to light the inevitable cigarette, slouches a Mexican who should be working. On Sundays and fête days, the roads about Sante Fé are splashed with the vivid colors of the girls’ frocks,--pinks, purples and scarlet accenting the inevitable black of the women’s dress,--as they make their way under fringy cottonwoods to some country alberge. The sound of a jerky accordion usually follows them up the canyon roads. Mostly the Mexicans are gregarious, keeping to their own quarters in Santa Fé, and their own villages further out in the country, often near an Indian pueblo of the same name, as at Taos and at Tesuque, famed for its grotesque Indian godlets. All about Santa Fé these little adobe towns, Chimayo, Teuchas, Cuamunque, Pojoaque, Espanola, Alcalde and Pecos, lie in some fertile river valley, surrounded by their fruit trees and alfalfa fields. The Mexicans, though indolent, understand truck farming thoroughly. Like their occupations, their recreations are primitive. They have their own dances, where the men sit on one side of the room and the girls, giggling and shoving, at the other, until some bold swain sets the ball rolling. Then it does not cease to roll, fast and furious, till morning, often ending in some tragic fray, where a knife flashes. [Illustration: AGAINST A SHADY WALL, ALL BUT TOO LAZY TO LIGHT THE INEVITABLE CIGARETTE, SLOUCHES, WHEREVER ONE TURNS, A MEXICAN.] They have their own schools and churches;--and almost always, at the end of the town, a little windowless house which looks like a church. The Americano is unwise who attempts to enter, or even ask questions concerning this building. It is the morado, or brotherhood house, of a secret sect called the Penitentes, who have been described briefly in certain books on this locality, but are almost unknown to the outside world. The sect is entirely Mexican, not Indian, as has frequently been misstated. Only a very few Indians have ever become Penitentes, and most of the race hold the idea in abhorrence. Survival of a cult which flourished in Spain four centuries ago, the practice was brought to Old Mexico, of which New Mexico was then a part, by some Franciscans who followed the conquistadores. In Lisbon, in 1801, a procession of flagellants went through the streets. This seems to have been the latest outbreak in Europe, yet in our own United States it stubbornly persists today, despite the utmost the Catholic church can do to discourage this horrible self-torture.