up a cork-screw and nearly vertical hill, the local bogey, and made it on high. I thanked Bill almost with tears, for being a gentleman and a mechanic. “I always claim,” answered Bill, modestly, “that a man aint got no right to take other people’s money, unless he gives ’em something in return. When I’m on a job, I try to do my best work, and I don’t figure to charge no more than it’s worth.” Ah, Bill! If every garageman in this free country adopted your code, what a motorist’s Paradise this might be! Almost weeping we said good-by to Bill that day--our last but one, we thought, in Santa Fé. We would have liked to take him with us, or at least to have found him awaiting us at each night’s stop, and Bill was gallant enough to say he would like to go. With two friends, we had planned an excursion to Chimayo, where in the Mexican half of the town are made soft, hand-woven rugs, famous the world over. On the way, we stopped at Pojoaque, for the purpose of seeing the old road-house made famous by old M. Boquet of fragrant memory, when Santa Fé was an army post, and officers rode out to lively supper parties here. A tangled orchard and flower garden, a well renowned for its pure water, and the quaint little Spanish widow of M. Boquet are all that is left of what was once a ship-shape inn where people loved to stop. The rest is cobwebs and rubbish. But any spot where gaiety has been enhanced by good food is always haunted by memories of former charm. At the sleepy Indian pueblo of Nambé, now fast diminishing, we forded a trickle of a stream, hardly wide enough to notice, which sported down from the hills. Then out into a sandy waste, surrounded by red buttes, we drove. And then we drove no further. On a hilltop the car gently ceased to move, even as it had done outside of Chandler. For a hot hour we examined and experimented, till we finally fastened the guilt on the ignition. We were ten miles from everywhere, and which were the shorter ten miles we were not exactly sure. Like the hypothetical donkey, starving between two bales of hay, we wasted time debating in which direction to go for help. An Indian riding by on a scalded looking pony we interrogated, but like all of his race, the more he was questioned the less he contributed. Much against his will, we rented his pony, and while the man of our party rode bareback to Pojoaque and the nearest telephone, we coaxed the pony’s owner from his sulks with sandwiches. Would that we had saved them for ourselves! Two hours later, Bill rattled up, in a car shabby as a shoemaker’s child’s shoes, and as disreputable as the proverbial minister’s son. Remembering our premature farewell, he grinned, lifted the hood of the car, nosed about for a moment, called sharply to his ten-year-old assistant for tools, and in two minutes the engine was running. Smiling just as cheerfully as if his farewell appearance had not cost us twenty dollars, Bill started his car, and wished us good luck.