In silence we returned to Juan’s warm, lighted living-room, where Mrs. Juan still sat by the fire admiring her red slippers. If it is humanly possible, I intend to be in Great Isleta about the year 1923. CHAPTER XIII SANTE FÉ AND THE VALLEY OF THE RIO GRANDE Nowhere else did we find spring as lovely as at Santa Fé. Here, a mile and a half above sea level, was a crystal freshness of atmosphere, through which filtered a quintessence of the sounds and scents and colors that make a joyous season of spring even in downtown New York. A bit of a surprise it was to find, dozing in the sun like a New England village, a town important enough to have given its name to a railroad; to mark the end of one trail, and be a station on another; to have been the capital of an ancient Empire of the New World; and now to be the capital of a state. Yet the world passes it by, leaving it on a railroad spur high and dry from transcontinental traffic. So much the worse, then, for the world; so much the better for Santa Fé. The town does not owe its personality to its railroad stations and Chambers of Commerce. The peaks guarding its high isolation have looked down upon many changes in its history. Yet it stays outwardly nearly unaltered; valuing material importance so little that it hides its Capitol down a grassy side street, while its Plaza still is dominated by the sturdy old Governor’s Palace, where Onate raised the Spanish flag in the early seventeenth century, and Kearny replaced it with the American flag in 1846.