n her the name of the "Never-tired Senora." Mrs. Gould
was indeed becoming a Costaguanera. Having acquired in Southern Europe a
knowledge of true peasantry, she was able to appreciate the great worth
of the people. She saw the man under the silent, sad-eyed beast of
burden. She saw them on the road carrying loads, lonely figures upon
the plain, toiling under great straw hats, with their white clothing
flapping about their limbs in the wind; she remembered the villages by
some group of Indian women at the fountain impressed upon her memory,
by the face of some young Indian girl with a melancholy and sensual
profile, raising an earthenware vessel of cool water at the door of a
dark hut with a wooden porch cumbered with great brown jars. The solid
wooden wheels of an ox-cart, halted with its shafts in the dust, showed
the strokes of the axe; and a party of charcoal carriers, with each
man's load resting above his head on the top of the low mud wall, slept
stretched in a row within the strip of shade.

The heavy stonework of bridges and churches left by the conquerors
proclaimed the disregard of human labour, the tribute-labour of vanished
nations. The power of king and church was gone, but at the sight of
some heavy ruinous pile overtopping from a knoll the low mud walls of a
village, Don Pepe would interrupt the tale of his campaigns to exclaim--

"Poor Costaguana! Before, it was everything for the Padres, nothing for
the people; and now it is everything for those great politicos in Sta.
Marta, for negroes and thieves."

Charles talked with the alcaldes, with the fiscales, with the
principal people in towns, and with the caballeros on the estates. The
commandantes of the districts offered him escorts--for he could show an
authorization from the Sulaco political chief of the day. How much the
document had cost him in gold twenty-dollar pieces was a secret between
himself, a great man in the United States (who condescended to answer
the Sulaco mail with his own hand), and a great man of another sort,
with a dark olive complexion and shifty eyes, inhabiting then the Palace
of the Intendencia in Sulaco, and who piqued himself on his culture and
Europeanism generally in a rather French style because he had lived in
Europe for some years--in exile, he said. However, it was pretty well
known that just before this exile he had incautiously gambled away all
the cash in the Custom House of a small port where a friend in power had