for the office of the sheriff of San Miguel County.

When people applied to the parish priest for advice in this matter,
he laughingly told them that he did not know if all these current
rumors were true, quien sabe, but surely nothing was impossible
before the Lord and the blessed saints, and Don Jose being a friend,
he advised them to give him their support, as he was a very good and
capable man who would make an ideal sheriff. To be sure, the Don paid
his debts and was never remiss in his duties to Holy Church.

We crossed over the Raton Mountains and were then in the northern
part of the Territory of New Mexico. What a curious country it was!
The houses were built of adobe or sun-dried brick of earth, in a very
primitive fashion. We seemed to be transported as by magic to the
Holy Land as it was in the lifetime of our Saviour. The architecture
of the buildings, the habits and raiment of the people, the stony
soil of the hills, covered by a thorny and sparse vegetation, the
irrigated fertile land of the valleys, the small fields surrounded by
adobe walls--all this could not fail to remind one vividly of
descriptions and pictures of Old Egypt and Palestine. Here you saw
the same dusty, primitive roads and quaint bullock carts, that were
hewn out of soft wood and joined together with thongs of rawhide and
built without the vestige of iron or other metal. There were the same
antediluvian plows, made of two sticks, as used in ancient Egypt at
the time of the Exodus, when Moses led the Jews out of captivity to
their Promised Land. The very atmosphere, so dry and exhilarating,
seemed strange. In this transparent air, objects which were twenty
miles distant seemed to be no farther than two or three miles at
most. In such a country it would not have surprised anyone to meet
the Saviour face to face, riding an ass or burro over the stony road,