o have kitchen
quarters for such as they. In the old days, Quality sat above the salt;
Quantity sat below it and slept in rushes spread on the floor. I would
respectfully offer a suggestion as to salting down much of the freshness
that weekly pesters the fine old baronial hospitality of the Painted
Desert. For instance, there was the Berlin professor, who arrived
unwanted and unannounced after midnight, and quietly informed his host
that he didn't care to rise for the family breakfast but would take his
at such an hour. There was the drummer who ordered the daughter of the
house "to hustle the fodder." There was the lady who stayed unasked for
three weeks, then departed to write ridiculous caricatures of the very
roof that had sheltered her. There was the Government man who calmly
ordered his host to have breakfast ready at three in the morning. His
host would not ask his colored help to rise at such an hour and with his
own hands prepared the breakfast, when the guest looked lazily through
the window and seeing a storm brewing "thought he'd not mind going after
all."

[Illustration: A Navajo boy who is exceptionally handsome and
picturesque]

"What?" demanded his entertainer. "You will not go after you have roused
me at three? You will go; and you will go quick; and you will go this
instant."

The Painted Desert is bound to become as well known to American
travelers as Algiers and the northern rim of the Sahara to the thousands
of European tourists, who yearly flock south of the Mediterranean. When
that time comes, a different system must prevail, so I would advise all
visitors going into the Navajo country to take their own food and camp
kit and horses, either rented from an outfitter at the starting point,
or bought outright. At St. Michael's Mission, and Ganado, and the Three
Mesas, and Oraibi, you can pick up the necessary local guide.

We entered the Painted Desert by way of Gallup, hiring driver and team
locally. Motors are available for the first thirty miles of the trip,
though out of the question for the main 150 miles, owing to the heavy
sand, fine as flour; but they happened to be out of commission the day
we wanted them.

The trail rises and rises from the sandy levels of the railroad town
till you are presently on the high northern mesa among scrub juniper and
cedar, in a cool-scented, ozone atmosphere, as life-giving as any frost
air of the North. The yellow ocher rocks close on each side in walled