rings.
This New Mexican air--there is none purer on the globe--is an enemy to
hay-fever and malarial diseases. It was a wise enterprise to provide
that those who wish to try its efficacy can do so at the Montezuma
without giving up any of the comforts of civilized life.

[Illustration: CHURCH AT LAGUNA.]

It is difficult to explain to one who has not seen it, or will not put
himself in the leisurely frame of mind to enjoy it, the charms of the
desert of the high plateaus of New Mexico and Arizona. Its arid
character is not so impressive as its ancientness; and the part which
interests us is not only the procession of the long geologic eras,
visible in the extinct volcanoes, the _barrancas_, the painted buttes,
the petrified forests, but as well in the evidences of civilizations
gone by, or the remains of them surviving in our day--the cliff
dwellings, the ruins of cities that were thriving when Coronado sent his
lieutenants through the region three centuries ago, and the present
residences of the Pueblo Indians, either villages perched upon an almost
inaccessible rock like Acamo, or clusters of adobe dwellings like Isleta
and Laguna. The Pueblo Indians, of whom the Zunis are a tribe, have been
dwellers in villages and cultivators of the soil and of the arts of
peace immemorially, a gentle, amiable race. It is indeed such a race as
one would expect to find in the land of the sun and the cactus. Their
manners and their arts attest their antiquity and a long refinement in
fixed dwellings and occupations. The whole region is a most interesting
field for the antiquarian.

We stopped one day at Laguna, which is on the Santa Fe line west of
Isleta, another Indian pueblo at the Atlantic and Pacific junction,
where the road crosses the Rio Grande del Norte west of Albuquerque.
Near Laguna a little stream called the Rio Puerco flows southward and
joins the Rio Grande. There is verdure along these streams, and gardens
and fruit orchards repay the rude irrigation. In spite of these
watercourses the aspect of the landscape is wild and desert-like--low
barren hills and ragged ledges, wide sweeps of sand and dry gray bushes,
with mountains and long lines of horizontal ledges in the distance.
Laguna is built upon a rounded elevation of rock. Its appearance is
exactly that of a Syrian village, the same cluster of little, square,
flat-roofed houses in terraces, the same brown color, and under the same
pale blue sky. And the resemblanc