When she first went to New Mexico, Mrs. Coolidge enjoyed transports of
enthusiasm over the quaintness and picturesqueness of its alien modes of
living. So she hunted all over Santa Fé for a house of the requisite
age, dilapidation, and eventful history, to transform into her own home.
And when at last she found this one, with an authenticated age of two
hundred years, and a romance, a crime, or a startling event for almost
every year in its history; with rough, irregular walls four feet thick;
with tiny, unglazed, iron-barred windows,--then time stopped, it seemed
to her, until the deed was recorded in her name.

With much sadness of heart she made sentiment give way to civilization
and renovated the interior. Wooden floors, instead of the packed earth,
hardened and glazed by the tread of many generations, plastered and
papered ceilings and walls and ample windows gave to the inside of the
house a modern air which its mistress deeply regretted, but accepted
mournfully as a necessary evil. But she did not allow a weed or a blade
of grass to be plucked from its roof; and upon the suggestion that the
old brown adobe walls should be treated to a coat of gray plaster she
frowned as if it had been blasphemy.

Upon the _placita_, which had been given over to weeds, tin cans, rags,
and broken dishes, she lavished loving care and made it the blooming,
fragrant heart of her home. In the centre was a locust tree of lusty
growth, plumy of foliage and brilliant of color; and underneath the tree
a little fountain shot upward a thin stream, which broke into a diamond
shower and fell plashing back into a pool whose rim was outlined by a
circle of purple-flowered iris. Around this spread a velvet turf, dotted
with dandelions and English daisies. An irregular, winding path inclosed
the tiny lawn, and all the space between the path and the narrow stone