Rhine round
that way so you could see it by moonlight.

* * * * *

Being a Westerner, it didn't inconvenience me _very_ seriously to rise
at four, and take a cab at five, and drive out from Albuquerque a mile
to the freight yards, where it was necessary to wet one's feet in an
_acequia_ ditch and crawl under a barb wire fence to reach the caboose.
The desert sunrise atoned for all--air pure wine, the red-winged
blackbirds, thousands of them, whistling sheer joy of life along the
overflow swamps of the irrigation canals. The train passes close enough
to the pueblo of Isleta for you to toss a stone into the back yards of
the little adobe dwellings; but Isleta at best is now a white-man
edition of Hopi type. Few of the houses run up tier on tier as in the
true pueblo; and the gorgeous skirts and shirts seen on the figures
moving round the doors are nothing more nor less than store calico in
diamond dyes. In the true Hopi pueblo, these garments would be sun-dyed
brown skin on the younger children, and home-woven, vegetable-dyed
fabric on the grown-ups. The true Hopi skirt is nothing more nor less
than an oblong of home-woven cloth, preferably white, or vegetable blue,
brought round to overlap in front under a belt, with, perhaps, shoulder
straps like a man's braces. A shawl over nature's undergarments
completes the native costume; and the little monkey-shaped bare feet
cramped from long scrambling over the rocks get better grip on steep
stone stairs than civilized boots, though many of the pueblo women are
now affecting the latter.

The freight train climbs and climbs into the gypsum country of terrible
drought, where nothing grows except under the ditch, and the cattle lie
dead of thirst, and the wind blows a hurricane of dust that almost
knocks you off your feet.

The railroad passes almost through the lower streets of Laguna; so that
when you look up, you see tier upon tier of streets and three-story
houses up and up to the Spanish Church that crowns the hill. You get
off at Laguna, but do not waste much time there; for the glories of
Laguna are past. Long ago--in the fifties or thereabouts--the dam to the
lagoon which gives the community its name broke, letting go a waste of
flood waters; and since that time, the men of Laguna have had to go away
for work, the women only remaining constantly at the village engaged
herding their flocks and making pottery. Perhaps it should be stated
he