with wood, which is sold at two bits, twenty-five cents,
the load. These are the most diminutive animals, and
usually mounted from behind, after the fashion of leap-frog.
The jackass is the only animal that can be subsisted in
this barren neighbourhood without great expense; our horses
are all sent to a distance of twelve, fifteen, and thirty
miles for grass.

I have interpolated these two somewhat similar descriptions of
Santa Fe written in that long ago when New Mexico was almost as
little known as the topography of the planet Mars, so that the
intelligent visitor of to-day may appreciate the wonderful changes
which American thrift, and that powerful civilizer, the locomotive,
have wrought in a very few years, yet it still, as one of the
foregoing writers has well said, "has the charm of foreign flavour,
and the soft syllables of the Spanish language are still heard."

The most positive exception must be taken to the statement of the
first-quoted writer in relation to the Palace, of which he says
"It is nothing more than the biggest mud-house in the town."
Now this "Palacio del Gobernador," as the old building was called
by the Spanish, was erected at a very early day. It was the
long-established seat of power when Penalosa confined the chief
inquisitor within its walls in 1663, and when the Pueblo authorities
took possession of it as the citadel of their central authority,
in 1681.

The old building cannot well be overlooked by the most careless
visitor to the quaint town; it is a long, low structure, taking up
the greater part of one side of the Plaza, round which runs a