t out laughing, for he had read my
thoughts exactly.

"My liver is as sound as yours, Harry, my boy," he said; "and I don't
believe that there's a heartier man within fifty miles. No, my lad, I'm
not jaundiced. There's no real prosperity here. The people are a lazy,
loafing set, and never happy but when they are in hot water. There's
the old, proud hidalgo blood mixed up in their veins; they are too grand
to work--too lazy to wash themselves. There isn't a decent fellow in
the neighbourhood, except one, and his name is Garcia--eh, Lill?" he
said, laughing.

Lilla's face crimsoned as she bent over her work, while a few minutes
after she rose and whispered to Mrs Landell.

"You must excuse me, Harry," said my aunt, rising. "Lilla is unwell;
the shock has been too much for her."

The next moment I was alone with my uncle, who proceeded in the same
bitter strain:

"Yes, my lad, commerce is all nohow here--everything's sluggish, and I
cannot see how matters are to mend. I'm glad to see you--heartily glad
you have come. Stay with us a few months if you are determined upon a
colonial life; see all you can of the country and judge for yourself;
but Heaven forbid that I should counsel my sister's child to settle in
such a revolutionary place!"

I was not long in finding out the truth of my uncle's words. The place
was volcanic, and earthquakes of no uncommon occurrence; but Nature in
the soil was not one half as bad as Nature in the human race--Spanish
half-blood and Indian--with which she had peopled the region, for they
were, to a man, stuffed with explosive material, which the spark of some
speaker's language was always liable to explode.

But I was delighted with the climate, in spite of the heat; and during
the calm, cool evenings, when the moon was glancing through the trees,
bright, pure, and silvery, again and again I thought of how happy I
could be there but for one thing.

That one thing was not the nature of the people nor their revolutionary
outbursts, for I may as well own that commerce or property had little
hold upon my thoughts until I found how necessary the latter was for my
success. My sole thought in those early days, and the one thing that
troubled me, was the constant presence of my uncle's wealthy neighbour,
Pablo Garcia.

It was plain enough that he had been for months past a visitor, and that
he had been looked upon as a suitor for Lilla's hand; but I could not
discover whether she