162 TEXAS AND ARIZONA 



was wide, whichever way I turned, and the trans- 

 parency of the atmosphere, of a kind never en- 

 joyed in New England except on some haK-dozen 

 days in a year, made it the wider and more al- 

 luring. It surprised me to see imposing public 

 buildings scattered about over the country. The 

 nearest must have been several miles from the 

 town, and each, so far as I could see, stood en- 

 tirely by itself. Here and there, also, miles 

 apart, were fine dwelling-houses, with outbuild- 

 ings and windmills ; each, like the public insti- 

 tutions just mentioned, standing alone, as if its 

 proprietor were also the proprietor of the entire 

 tract of country roundabout. Eich men's ranches, 

 they should perhaps be called. All these, or 

 most of them, would have been invisible from 

 my fence-rail perch, but for the fact, which really 

 made the strangeness of the whole spectacle to a 

 New England man's eyes, that the rolling land 

 is all unwooded — a broad landscape, stretching 

 away and away, north, south, east, and west, and 

 no forest ! The slopes look, at a little distance, 

 — just as the one on which I was now sitting 

 had looked to me half a mile back, — as if they 

 might be planted with young peach orchards. 

 They are really covered loosely with wild shrubs 

 ten or fifteen feet high, now budded and in pale 

 green leaf (Huisache, I understand their Mexican 



