The heart of Santa Fé is its Plaza. To its shady trees, traders tied their horses when they had reached the end of the perilous Santa Fé Trail, glad enough to gain its shelter after being beset by the primitive dangers of hunger, thirst, wild beasts, Indians and robbers. The same Plaza where drowsy Mexicans now rest upon park benches, where processions of burros pass loaded with firewood, where shining automobiles flash by, has witnessed siege and countersiege, scenes of violence and heroism and romance. Richly laden caravans once came galloping into the town, sometimes closely beset by bandits or hostile Apaches, and weary adventurers from the land of Daniel Boone or Washington dismounted, and looked bewildered about them at this gay and alien civilization. Here the Pueblo Indians, in their final revolt, besieged the white settlers, and committed the only violences in their long career of patience, and here the conquering De Vargas finally overcame them, and surrounded by Franciscan monks, offered mass for his victory. Dominating the Plaza is the three century old Governor’s Palace, whose walls conceal prehistoric Indian foundations. It is a one-story building running half the length of the square, built in a day when hospitality demanded royal scope. Half inn, half fort, its six-foot thick walls stood for strength as well as coolness, and its mighty doors frequently knew the marks of assault. In modern times, until the beginning of this century it served as residence of the governor of the Territory. In a back room, Lew Wallace is said to have written chapters of Ben Hur. No question but that the Palace might be made more interesting as a Museum, less a storehouse of half forgotten oddments. It might tell less spasmodically and with greater dignity the story of its successive occupations, from the Royal Governor of Spain to the present time. It creates the impression now of having been forgotten, except as, at intervals, a legacy of antiquities was deposited wholesale, without selection. The exhibits should be pruned, gaps filled, and arranged with better proportion and consecutiveness. It might well, indeed, take a leaf from the book of the new Museum, built on the same side of the Plaza. Its exterior skilfully assembles various parts of nearby buildings of Pueblo architecture. Its corners copy the towers of Laguna, Taos and Acoma. The warm stucco walls are studded with pinon _vegas_, and the doorways, windows and balconies are of cedar, deep-set in the thick walls. An infant art-gallery, fed from the local Santa Fé and Taos schools, sometimes according to Holt and sometimes on Cubist pickles and doughnuts, does the double service of giving the artist permanent exhibition-rooms, and illustrating local color for the tourist.