distance, and the great herds fed with all
their horned heads one way, in one single wavering line as far as eye
could reach across the broad potreros. A spreading cotton-wool tree
shaded a thatched ranche by the road; the trudging files of burdened
Indians taking off their hats, would lift sad, mute eyes to the
cavalcade raising the dust of the crumbling camino real made by the
hands of their enslaved forefathers. And Mrs. Gould, with each day's
journey, seemed to come nearer to the soul of the land in the tremendous
disclosure of this interior unaffected by the slight European veneer
of the coast towns, a great land of plain and mountain and people,
suffering and mute, waiting for the future in a pathetic immobility of
patience.

She knew its sights and its hospitality, dispensed with a sort of
slumbrous dignity in those great houses presenting long, blind walls and
heavy portals to the wind-swept pastures. She was given the head of the
tables, where masters and dependants sat in a simple and patriarchal
state. The ladies of the house would talk softly in the moonlight under
the orange trees of the courtyards, impressing upon her the sweetness
of their voices and the something mysterious in the quietude of their
lives. In the morning the gentlemen, well mounted in braided sombreros
and embroidered riding suits, with much silver on the trappings of
their horses, would ride forth to escort the departing guests before
committing them, with grave good-byes, to the care of God at the
boundary pillars of their estates. In all these households she
could hear stories of political outrage; friends, relatives, ruined,
imprisoned, killed in the battles of senseless civil wars, barbarously
executed in ferocious proscriptions, as though the government of the
country had been a struggle of lust between bands of absurd devils let
loose upon the land with sabres and uniforms and grandiloquent phrases.
And on all the lips she found a weary desire for peace, the dread of
officialdom with its nightmarish parody of administration without law,
without security, and without justice.

She bore a whole two months of wandering very well; she had that power
of resistance to fatigue which one discovers here and there in some
quite frail-looking women with surprise--like a state of possession by
a remarkably stubborn spirit. Don Pepe--the old Costaguana major--after
much display of solicitude for the delicate lady, had ended by
conferring upo