great Llanos of
the South. "If you will listen to an old officer of Paez, senores," was
the exordium of all his speeches in the Aristocratic Club of Sulaco,
where he was admitted on account of his past services to the extinct
cause of Federation. The club, dating from the days of the proclamation
of Costaguana's independence, boasted many names of liberators amongst
its first founders. Suppressed arbitrarily innumerable times by
various Governments, with memories of proscriptions and of at least one
wholesale massacre of its members, sadly assembled for a banquet by the
order of a zealous military commandante (their bodies were afterwards
stripped naked and flung into the plaza out of the windows by the
lowest scum of the populace), it was again flourishing, at that period,
peacefully. It extended to strangers the large hospitality of the cool,
big rooms of its historic quarters in the front part of a house, once
the residence of a high official of the Holy Office. The two wings, shut
up, crumbled behind the nailed doors, and what may be described as a
grove of young orange trees grown in the unpaved patio concealed the
utter ruin of the back part facing the gate. You turned in from the
street, as if entering a secluded orchard, where you came upon the foot
of a disjointed staircase, guarded by a moss-stained effigy of some
saintly bishop, mitred and staffed, and bearing the indignity of a
broken nose meekly, with his fine stone hands crossed on his breast. The
chocolate-coloured faces of servants with mops of black hair peeped
at you from above; the click of billiard balls came to your ears, and
ascending the steps, you would perhaps see in the first sala, very stiff
upon a straight-backed chair, in a good light, Don Pepe moving his long
moustaches as he spelt his way, at arm's length, through an old Sta.
Marta newspaper. His horse--a stony-hearted but persevering black brute
with a hammer head--you would have seen in the street dozing motionless
under an immense saddle, with its nose almost touching the curbstone of
the sidewalk.

Don Pepe, when "down from the mountain," as the phrase, often heard in
Sulaco, went, could also be seen in the drawing-room of the Casa Gould.
He sat with modest assurance at some distance from the tea-table.
With his knees close together, and a kindly twinkle of drollery in his
deep-set eyes, he would throw his small and ironic pleasantries into the
current of conversation. There was in tha