walk that hugged the four sides of the house was rich with roses. La
France and American Beauty and Jacqueminot and many others were there in
profusion and made the placita a thing of beauty from the time the frosts
ended until they came again. A hand rail covered with climbing roses
guarded the stone walk on three sides of the court, while the fourth side
of the house was screened by a _portal_ over which roses and honeysuckles
clambered to the roof. Facing the wide, roofed passage which gave
entrance from the street, stood an arch loaded with honeysuckle vines.

Mrs. Coolidge's enthusiasm over New Mexican history, and her admiration
for the heroic times of the _Conquistadores_, had caused her to make the
interior of her home almost a museum of antiquities. On the floors
Navajo blankets--fifty, a hundred, a hundred and fifty years old, and
each one with its own dramatic tale--served as rugs. Silken _rebozos_,
worn by high-hearted cavaliers riding in search of "_la gran Quivera_"
draped her windows. Pueblo pottery, dug from villages that were in ruins
when the first white men saw them, filled cabinets and shelves. Saddle
skirts of embroidered leather, which had pleased the fancy of some brave
_capitan_ leading a handful of men against a rebellious pueblo two
centuries ago, made a background for the huge silver spurs of cunning
workmanship with which some other daring _caballero_ had urged his horse
in search of adventures and of gold. And beside them lay the stone axe
with which a courageous señora, a heroine of the Southwest, had cleft the
skull of a Navajo chief and saved her townspeople from falling into the
hands of the savage enemy. On the walls were old, old paintings of
_Nuestra Señora de_ this and that, proud of neck and sad and sweet of
face, which had been brought from the City of Mexico on the backs of
burros, and adored in little adobe churches by generations of men, women,
and children, and pierced by the arrows of angry and revengeful Indians
during the pueblo rebellion, or scarred by fires of destruction, from