University of Virginia Library

THIS is a telling of the politeness of Questa la Platta, which is the most polite of the Spanish-speaking towns of New Mexico. It is also distinguished for goat's milk cheese, made and ripened after receipts already ancient when they came into New Spain with St. John of the Gentlemen. This politeness and the pride of their sole product Questa la Platta laid on the altar of Americanism in the year nineteen seventeen. I ask you, what more could a town do?

Questa la Platta is a day's journey from anywhere, and its geography is mostly on end, which accounts for the prevalence of goatherding as an industry. All the ore having long since been taken out of the Silver Search Mine, which gave the place its name, the young men of Questa la Platta have taken to following it, spreading the town's reputation for politeness and little white, leathery cheeses wherever they go.

Letter-writing, however, being at best a perilous adventure, and reading a matter better left with those who can see some use in it, the town did not certainly know that it was implicated in the great war until the draft reached out for the whole two of their able-bodied young men. But how was anybody even then to feel certain that those animales of Germans would not make peace for themselves before the men of Questa la Platta could get at them? What else was there for the town to do but register the high mark of that cortissima for which for two hundred years it had been distinguished?