cathedral. Rio Medio had been a place of some splendour in its time. The
ruinous heavy buildings clung to the hillsides, and my eyes plunged into
a broad vista of an empty and magnificent street. Behind many of the
imposing and escutcheoned frontages there was nothing but heaps of
rubble; the footsteps of rare passers-by woke lonely echoes, and strips
of grass outlined in parallelograms the flagstones of the roadway. The
Casa Riego raised its buttressed and loop-holed bulk near the shore,
resembling a defensive outwork; on my other hand the shallow bay, vast,
placid, and shining, extended itself behind the strip of coast like an
enormous lagoon. The fronds of palm-clusters dotted the beach over the
glassy shimmer of the far distance. The dark and wooded slopes of the
hills closed the view inland on every side.

Under the palms the green masses of vegetation concealed the hovels of
the rabble. There were three so-called 'villages' at the bottom of the
bay; and that good Catholic and terrible man, Senor Juez O'Brien, could
with a simple nod send every man in them to the gallows.

The respectable population of Rio Medio, leading a cloistered existence
in the ruins of old splendour, used to call that thievish rabble
_Lugarenos_--villagers. They were sea-thieves, but they were dangerous.
At night, from these clusters of hovels surrounded by the banana
plantations, there issued a villainous noise, the humming of hived
scoundrels. Lights twinkled. One could hear the thin twanging of
guitars, uproarious songs, all the sounds of their drinking, singing,
gambling, quarrelling, love-making, squalor. Sometimes the long shriek
of a woman rent the air, or shouting tumults rose and subsided; while,
on the other side of the cathedral, the houses of the past, the houses
without life, showed no light and made no sound.

There would be no strollers on the beach in the daytime; the masts of
the two schooners (bought in the United States by O'Brien to make war
with on the British Empire) appeared like slender sticks far away up
the empty stretch of water; and that gathering of ruffians, thieves,
murderers, and runaway slaves slept in their noisome dens. Their habits
were obscene and nocturnal. Cruel without hardihood, and greedy without
courage, they were no skull-and-crossbones pirates of the old kind,
that, under the black flag, neither gave nor expected quarter. Their
usual practice was to hang in rowboats round some unfortunate ship
b