When people applied to the parish priest for advice in this matter, he laughingly told them that he did not know if all these current rumors were true, quien sabe, but surely nothing was impossible before the Lord and the blessed saints, and Don Jose being a friend, he advised them to give him their support, as he was a very good and capable man who would make an ideal sheriff.  To be sure, the Don paid his debts and was never remiss in his duties to Holy Church.

We crossed over the Raton Mountains and were then in the northern part of the Territory of New Mexico.  What a curious country it was!  The houses were built of adobe or sun-dried brick of earth, in a very primitive fashion.  We seemed to be transported as by magic to the Holy Land as it was in the lifetime of our Saviour.  The architecture of the buildings, the habits and raiment of the people, the stony soil of the hills, covered by a thorny and sparse vegetation, the irrigated fertile land of the valleys, the small fields surrounded by adobe walls—­all this could not fail to remind one vividly of descriptions and pictures of Old Egypt and Palestine.  Here you saw the same dusty, primitive roads and quaint bullock carts, that were hewn out of soft wood and joined together with thongs of rawhide and built without the vestige of iron or other metal.  There were the same antediluvian plows, made of two sticks, as used in ancient Egypt at the time of the Exodus, when Moses led the Jews out of captivity to their Promised Land.  The very atmosphere, so dry and exhilarating, seemed strange.  In this transparent air, objects which were twenty miles distant seemed to be no farther than two or three miles at most.  In such a country it would not have surprised anyone to meet the Saviour face to face, riding an ass or burro over the stony road, followed by His disciples and a multitude of people, who, with the most implicit faith in the Lord’s power to perform miracles, expected Him to provide them with an abundance of loaves and fishes.  Here we were in a country, a territory of the United States, which was about eighteen hundred years behind the civilization of other Christian countries.

As we passed through the many little hamlets and towns, the male population, who were sitting on the shady side of their houses, regarded us with lazy curiosity.  They were leaning against the cool, adobe walls, dreaming and smoking cigarettes.  The ladies seemed to possess a livelier disposition and emerged from their houses to gossip and gather news.  They viewed me with the greatest interest and curiosity and, shifting the mantillas, or rebozos, behind which they hid their faces after the Moorish fashion, they gazed at me with shining eyes.  And I believe that I found favor with many, for they would exclaim, “M’ira que Americanito tan lindo, tan blanco!” (What a handsome young American.  See what beautiful blue eyes he has and what a white complexion.) And mothers warned the maidens not to look at me, as I