.

It may be broadly said that the characteristics of the Spanish-American
ladies of Chili, Peru, and the rest of the greater Spanish-American
states were from the first, and continue until now, very like those of
the Mexican women. Even physically there is a great resemblance in the
races, as indeed there should be, considering the identity of parent
stock. Their complexions were and are rarely good; but their hair and
eyes are generally fine and their figures excellent, while small feet
form a national physical trait of which they, like their Mexican
sisters, are exceedingly proud. There has never been any marked racial
individuality among the women of South America, and what little there
once was has entirely disappeared. Even early in the past century a
traveller, in noting the influx of European manners, said: "This spirit
of imitation is natural and praiseworthy, but it produces a cloying
sameness; it is a leveller, destructive alike of national and personal
individuality, and the traveller, tired of seeing continually reproduced
the manners, customs, dress, and even ideas with which he has always
been familiar, will tarry with pleasure in those spots presenting the
freshness of originality. Such spots exist only where a continual
jostling with the exterior world has not abraded the salient angles of
the national character."

It may be added that such spots have become increasingly difficult to
find, and that the romance of South America has entirely disappeared
before the march of "progress." Yet few countries have known more of
romance, and this in regard to her women, though the chronicle is scanty
and must be pieced together from scraps of information. Perhaps the most
romantic era of South American women was that of the buccaneers. It was
a brief time and one that held much of peril to womanly honor and
virtue; but it also held delightful possibilities for the daughters of
Spain in their new home. These ladies, even some of noble birth, looked
not unkindly upon the "hereticos" who came with fire and sword to gain
wealth in the shape of booty and ransom. Do we not read in quaint old
chronicle of that paladin of a filibuster, Revenau de Lussan, who, in
1685, put Panama to ransom and then occupied the town of Queaquilla? De
Lussan was a freebooter, which is a polite way of writing "pirate," and
he was a Frenchman in days when Gallic morals were not on the highest of
planes even when judged by the usual standard