shadow and a patch of green things growing.

From the spring at the top of the slope behind the house a line of
noble old cottonwoods files along the _acequia_ halfway down the hill,
and there, where the ditch divides, forks into a spreading double row,
which incloses the house and stables and comes together again in a
little grove beyond the road, where the two ditches empty into a pond.
The house lies there in this circlet of trees, a low, whitewashed,
flat-roofed adobe, rambling along in apparent aimlessness from cosey
rooms through sheds and stables, until the whole connecting structure
incloses a large corral.

In front of the house is a tiny square of blue-grass, bordered by beds
of geraniums and larkspurs and hollyhocks, inclosed by a low adobe
wall, and shaded by a young cottonwood growing in the centre. Beyond,
on the slope of the hill below the ditch, where its waters can be
spread over all the surface, is the rich, velvety emerald of the
alfalfa field. And the fame of that little square of grass and of that
little field of alfalfa fills all the land from Deming to Silver City,
and from Separ to the Mimbres.

And that is Apache Teju, headquarters for the northern half of a ranch
that spreads over seven thousand square miles of the arid hills and
plains of southern New Mexico, where for hours and hours you may travel
toward a horizon swimming in heat, across the gray, hot, quivering
levels, broken only by clumps of gay-flowered cactus and the blanching
bones and sun-dried hides of cattle, dead of starvation and thirst.

The superintendent's wife and I sat in the tiny grass plat enjoying the
balmy breath that in the late afternoon steals over and cools this