University of Virginia Library

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An adequate opportunity for doing so did not arrive, however, until near the close of the first year of the war, when the mail-carrier from Arroyada brought word that the Government at Washington was sending a food expert to teach them how to conserve food for the armies by eating meat once a day. Once a day, mind you! Dios y santos! but that was a thing Questa la Platta would be glad to learn!

Up to this time Questa la Platta had not thought of itself as wasteful in the matter of food. There were brown beans raised in the pockets of the hills, also a little wheat, which is harvested by hand and ground as required in the water mill of Pablo Romero, which is at least as old as the American Constitution. In sickness there was always a chicken that could be spared, and from afar the walls of Questa la Platta could be picked out against the mountain-side by the strings of scarlet peppers drying. Meat hunger, when it grew imperative, was satisfied by the killing of a goat or a calf, of which everybody in the village ate as long as it lasted. The famous cheeses were seldom eaten

in Questa la Platta. What else had they for trade and the support of the town's reputation? And should this be sacrificed because one felt a little more empty than usual? When it was learned that the food expert meant to pay them a visit, Questa la Platta felt that the keeping up of the reputation of the cheeses had not cost too much; they were ravished with a sense of the delicate condescension of the Government at Washington. Pablo Romero, who as postmaster was felt to be somewhat in the confidence of the Government, considered that there might be a possibility of sending a consignment of the cheeses to the front, where they would undoubtedly be appreciated.

The food expert was a young and charming woman who had had two periods of domestic science at her state university and was engaged to a lieutenant in the Aviation Corps. She came up, a whole day's journey, with the mail-carrier from Arroyada, with a brief-case full of food-administration leaflets, a colored chart of food values, and full directions for putting down eggs in water-glass and making goat's milk cheese. The mail-carrier, who was a Questa la Platta man, did his best to present the country to her in the most engaging light. He also, being himself of a politeness, learned something of what she hoped to accomplish for Questa la Platta. She would teach them to make goat's milk cheese.

But goat's milk cheese! The matrons of Questa la Platta to whom this was privately communicated put their hands over their mouths with astonishment; by which sign you may know that the particular community was founded on and had absorbed a Tewa Pueblo. Señora Peladero, at whose house the expert was to be entertained, recalled them to the tradition. This might be a trick of those animales, the enemy, to rob the town of its true glory; but, on the other hand, there was always its politeness. On the strength of the reputation of her own cheeses as far afield as Albuquerque, Señora Peladero decreed that for as long as the Señorita Hooverino remained in Questa la Platta, its inhabitants should know nothing of goat's milk cheese except what it pleased the Government to teach them.