lower classes of women is a simple petticoat, with arms and
shoulders bare, except what may chance to be covered by
the reboso.

The men who have means to do so dress after our fashion;
but by far the greater number, when they dress at all,
wear leather breeches, tight around the hips and open from
the knee down; shirt and blanket take the place of our
coat and vest.

The city is dependent on the distant hills for wood, and
at all hours of the day may be seen jackasses passing laden
with wood, which is sold at two bits, twenty-five cents,
the load. These are the most diminutive animals, and
usually mounted from behind, after the fashion of leap-frog.
The jackass is the only animal that can be subsisted in
this barren neighbourhood without great expense; our horses
are all sent to a distance of twelve, fifteen, and thirty
miles for grass.

I have interpolated these two somewhat similar descriptions of Santa Fe
written in that long ago when New Mexico was almost as little known as
the topography of the planet Mars, so that the intelligent visitor of
to-day may appreciate the wonderful changes which American thrift, and
that powerful civilizer, the locomotive, have wrought in a very few
years, yet it still, as one of the foregoing writers has well said,
"has the charm of foreign flavour, and the soft syllables of the Spanish
language are still heard."

The most positive exception must be taken to the statement of the
first-quoted writer in relation to the Palace, of which he says "It is
nothing more than the biggest mud-house in the town." Now this "Palacio
del Gobernador," as the old building was called by the Spanish, was
erected at a very early day. It was the long-established seat of power
when Penalosa confined the chief inquisitor within its walls in 1663,
and when the Pueblo authorities took possession of it as the citadel of
their central authority, in 1681.

The old building cannot well be overlooked by the most careless visitor
to the quaint town; it is a long, low structure, taking up the greater
part of one side of the Plaza, round which runs a colonnade supported
by pillars of rough pine. In this once leaky old Palace were kept,
or rather neglected, the archives of the Territory until the American
residents, appreciating the importance of pre