hat says he, Padre?" murmured the sinking girl.

The priest bent close to her.

"He says come, _carita_--come!"

With a fluttering sigh the tired child sank back into the priest's
arms and dropped softly into her long sleep.

CHAPTER 17

The twisted, turbid "Danube of New Granada," under the gentle guidance
of its patron, Saint Mary Magdalene, threads the greater part of its
sinuous way through the heart of Colombia like an immense, slow-moving
morass. Born of the arduous tropic sun and chill snows, and imbued by
the river god with the nomadic instinct, it leaps from its pinnacled
cradle and rushes, sparkling with youthful vigor, down precipice and
perpendicular cliff; down rocky steeps and jagged ridges; whirling in
merry, momentary dance in shaded basins; singing in swirling eddies;
roaring in boisterous cataracts, to its mad plunge over the lofty wall
of Tequendama, whence it subsides into the dignity of broad maturity,
and begins its long, wandering, adult life, which slowly draws to a
sluggish old age and final oblivion in the infinite sea. Toward the
close of its meandering course, long after the follies and excesses of
early life, it takes unto itself a consort, the beautiful Cauca; and
together they flow, broadening and deepening as life nears its end;
merging their destinies; sharing their burdens; until at last, with
labors ended, they sink their identities in the sunlit Caribbean.

When the simple-minded _Conquistadores_ first pushed their frail
cockleshells out into the gigantic embouchure of this tawny stream and
looked vainly for the opposite shore, veiled by the dewy mists of a
glittering morn, they unconsciously crossed themselves and, forgetful
for the moment of greed and rapine and the lust of gold, stood in
reverent awe before the handiwork of their Creator. Ere the Spaniard
had laid his fell curse upon this ancient kingdom of the Chibchas, the
flowering banks of the Magdalena, to-day so mournfully characterized
by their frightful solitudes, were an almost unbroken village from the
present coast city of Barranquilla to Honda, the limit of navigation,
some nine hundred miles to the south. The cupidity of the heartless,
bigoted rabble from mediaeval slums which poured into this wonderland
late in the sixteenth century laid waste this luxuriant vale and
exterminated its trustful inhabitants. Now the warm airs that sigh at
night along the great river's uncultivated borders seem still to echo