I mean no disparagement here against the Santa Fé school, which numbers several names of national reputation. The country cries to be painted in vividest colors; Nature here is in vermilion mood, and man tops her gayety with slouching _insouciance_, sky-blue shirts, and head-bands giving the needful splash of scarlet. Add skies as blue as a spring sun can stipple them, dash across them a blur of pink apricot bloom, bank them against cliffs of red-orange, pure gold where the light strikes it, and grape purple in the shadows, tone with the warm gray of a pueblo clustered about a sky-blue stream, and fringed yellow-green cottonwoods bordering it,--and what artist can paint with sobriety? That a few manage it is to their credit, nor can one wonder that this riot of color goes to the heads of others till their canvasses look like an explosion in a vegetable garden. Tucked away in another street off the Plaza stands the old Cathedral, begun in 1612. As cathedrals go it is an unimpressive example of the worst period of church architecture: to the usual trappings of its interior is added the barbaric crudity of the Mexican in church art; an art like the French Canadian’s, naïve and literal. It must show the bleeding heart much ensanguined, the wounds of Christ fresh with gore, and its doll-faced saints covered with lace and blue satin, like fashion plates of Godey’s Ladies. What interests me in this as in other churches of the Southwest is the colossal ironic joke on the Pilgrim Fathers and Puritans, whose contemporary efforts on the stern rock-bound eastern coast were just about offset by the equally earnest efforts of the Spanish padres on the cactus-ridden desert of the west. However, what each bequeathed of value has remained to build a vaster, freer, and perhaps better community than either unwitting opponent previsioned. Quite Colonial, and oddly reminiscent of New England is the Governor’s mansion of today, across from the present Capitol, which like every Capitol in the United States rears a helmet shaped dome. In the houses of this New Mexican government occurs a phenomenon unknown to any other state: two languages are officially spoken, Mexican and English, with an interpreter to make each side intelligible to the other. I do not know whether this bilingual Assembly and Senate produces twice as much verbiage as the usual legislature or whether the two tongues serve as a deterrent to oratory.