he thick of history, found
time for an hour or so during an afternoon in the drawing-room of the
Casa Gould, where, with a strange ignorance of the real forces at work
around him, he professed himself delighted to get away from the
strain of affairs. He did not know what he would have done without his
invaluable Nostromo, he declared. Those confounded Costaguana politics
gave him more work--he confided to Mrs. Gould--than he had bargained
for.

Don Jose Avellanos had displayed in the service of the endangered
Ribiera Government an organizing activity and an eloquence of which
the echoes reached even Europe. For, after the new loan to the Ribiera
Government, Europe had become interested in Costaguana. The Sala of the
Provincial Assembly (in the Municipal Buildings of Sulaco), with its
portraits of the Liberators on the walls and an old flag of Cortez
preserved in a glass case above the President's chair, had heard all
these speeches--the early one containing the impassioned declaration
"Militarism is the enemy," the famous one of the "trembling balance"
delivered on the occasion of the vote for the raising of a second
Sulaco regiment in the defence of the reforming Government; and when the
provinces again displayed their old flags (proscribed in Guzman Bento's
time) there was another of those great orations, when Don Jose greeted
these old emblems of the war of Independence, brought out again in the
name of new Ideals. The old idea of Federalism had disappeared. For
his part he did not wish to revive old political doctrines. They were
perishable. They died. But the doctrine of political rectitude was
immortal. The second Sulaco regiment, to whom he was presenting this
flag, was going to show its valour in a contest for order, peace,
progress; for the establishment of national self-respect without
which--he declared with energy--"we are a reproach and a byword amongst
the powers of the world."

Don Jose Avellanos loved his country. He had served it lavishly with
his fortune during his diplomatic career, and the later story of his
captivity and barbarous ill-usage under Guzman Bento was well known
to his listeners. It was a wonder that he had not been a victim of
the ferocious and summary executions which marked the course of that
tyranny; for Guzman had ruled the country with the sombre imbecility of
political fanaticism. The power of Supreme Government had become in his
dull mind an object of strange worship, as if it