212 MAJOR JOHN F. LACEY 



lege presidents, business men, ranchers, farmers, teach- 

 ers, lawyers, doctors, supreme court justices, preachers, 

 students, old young people of twelve years, and young old 

 people of seventy joined to make the meeting enjoyable 

 as well as instructive. And they were a jolly lot. Only 

 one kicker was reported, and she arrived after dark and 

 left early next morning. 



They slept in tents or in the caves, washed in the Rito, 

 and took their meals at Judge Abbott's excellent table at 

 his stone ranch-house in the canon. He called his guests 

 to the table by ringing a triangle, but the meals were 

 square. 



There are in the Puye, the Tschrege, and the Rito de los 

 Frijoles enough cave dwellings and remains of communal 

 houses to have sheltered a population of fifty thousand 

 souls, if they had all been occupied in the same time. 



One communal ruin on the top of the mesa of Puye con- 

 tains 1,600 rooms, which would rival some of our modern 

 skyscrapers in its capacity, and its three and four stories 

 of apartments, built with stone tools in the long ago, show 

 a great degree of skill. The plastered floor and walls 

 exhibit methods of industry and cleanliness. 



We saw how this work was done at Acoma, when we ar- 

 rived in 1902, after a heavy rain. Mud was plentiful in 

 the streets. The men were out harvesting in their little 

 fields, from five to twenty miles away, and the women 

 were busy freshening up the plaster of their three-story 

 houses and whitening them with a whitewash made from 

 rocks near at hand. 



Their little brown hands were used as trowels and the 

 mud was spread as smoothly as though they had belonged 

 to the plasterers' union. 



In the narrow valley of the Rito is one of the communal 

 ruins of perhaps a thousand rooms, and twenty Tewa In- 



