Harry Alverson Franck

I settled down for months in Quito. Not only were my Canal Zone experiences to be written, but I had long since planned to become a bona fide resident of a typical small South American capital. A letter of introduction won me quarters in the home of SeÑor Don Francisco OrdoÑez V, in the calle Flores, while Hays hung up his hat in even more sumptuous surroundings around the corner.

But not so fast! Not even whole-hearted “Don Panchito” would have received me in the state of sartorial delapidation of our arrival. The people of Quito are somewhat less rigid disciples of Beau Brummel than those of BogotÁ, but they are still far from negligent in dress. Most of the clothes indispensable to our entrance into the ranks of the gente decente had been mailed in Jirardot, the rest had been turned over to the American “drummer” in Cali. The first shock Quito had in store for us was the information that no parcel of any shape or description had come from Colombia in months, the second was the discovery that the traveling-man had not arrived. It was hard to realize that we had outwalked all the established means of transportation in this equatorial land.

An unavoidable round of the shops wiped out the remnant of my savings as a policeman, and brought me down again to the letter of credit that had lain fallow more than a half year. Except for tailor-made suits, the cost of replenishing a wardrobe was startling. Ready-made clothing for men is rare in the cities of the Andes, and it is far more economical to be fitted to order in one of the sastrerÍas that abound in almost every street,—dingy little rooms, their fronts all doorway, in which sit anemic half-breed youths sewing languidly, yet incessantly, now and then carrying the charcoal-filled “goose” out into the street to blow out the ashes, and as dependent on the passing throng for inspiration as the craftsmen of Damascus. As in the more northern capital, the chief line of demarkation between the gente and the pueblo of Quito is the white collar. Naturally, the tendency is to make it as wide and distinct as possible. I had canvassed the entire city before I found my customary brand of neckwear—at four times its American price—only to discover that the lowest collar in stock was designed for some species of human giraffe.

“You misunderstand me,” I protested, “I did not ask for a cuff.”

“This is a collar, seÑor,” cried the shopkeeper.

“Something lower, please.”

“But this is a very low collar! It is so low that no one in Quito will wear it, and we are not importing any more of this brand.”

In the matter of shoes, I found at last a Massachusetts product that might have served; but when I had beaten the dealer down to about twice the American price, a seven was found to be the largest size in stock. The merchant seemed on the verge of tears.

“Why, seÑor,” he gasped, gazing resentfully at the offending member, “there is not a foot in Quito as large as that shoe.”

He did not mean exactly what he said, but it was natural that he should have had in mind only the minority of quiteÑos who wear shoes. These squeeze their feet into articles of effeminate, toothpick shape for custom’s sake, as they force their necks into collars that come little short of hanging, and have their trousers made sailor-fashion, that their feet may look still more ladylike. One cannot, of course, pose as an aristocrat on the broad hoofs of an Indian. In the end I was forced to submit to botas de hule, an imitation patent-leather shoe made in Guayaquil.

Hays concluded that with a general overhauling he could pass muster until our bundles arrived. But on one point immediate renewal was unavoidable. He paused in the doorway of one of the little sewing dens to ask:

“Can you make me a pair of trousers by Saturday night?”

In spite of having pillowed for weeks on Ramsey, Hays never could remember that Castilian trousers come singly.

“Un par, seÑor!” cried the tailor, “Ah, no, that is impossible so soon. I can make you a trouser by then, but not two of them. Then, while you are wearing the one, I can perhaps make the other, if the seÑor is in such haste.”

“Oh, all right,” said Hays, suddenly recalling that trousers are—I mean is—singular in Spanish, “go ahead. I’ll try to get along with one over Sunday.”

The error persisted, however. It was not three days later that he was halted at the door of his lodgings by a whining beggar.

“Una caridad, caballero! Have you not perhaps some old clothes to give a poor unfortunate?”

A view of Quito, backed by the Panecillo that bottles it up on the south. There are six conventos in sight

A patio of the Monastery of San Francisco, one of the eighteen monasteries and convents of Quito, said to be the most extensive in the Western Hemisphere

“Sure,” said the generous ex-corporal of police. “I’ll bring you down a pair of trousers.”

He did so, whereupon the beggar growled angrily:

“But you said a pair! Where is the other one?”

Few quiteÑo dwellings are equipped with bathrooms. I halted a passerby to inquire for a public casa de baÑos, and was directed to the foot of the calle Rocafuerte.

“Hot baths?” I queried, suspiciously.

“Certainly, seÑor,” he answered haughtily; “If you go there any morning about ten, when the sun is shining, you will find them quite caliente.”

A crumbling old adobe gate, marked “BaÑos de Milagro,” gave entrance to an aged two-story building of the same material. Passing through this, I was astonished to find spread out before me what looked like an immense outdoor swimming-pool. It was illusion. Nearer approach showed a broad sheet of water barely six inches deep, a half-acre of it warming in the sun. I suddenly recalled that the same word serves in Spanish for all degrees of temperature from hot to luke-warm. About the basin were many little adobe dens, in the center of each a stone basin some four feet deep, with steps leading down into it. The fee was a mere real (five cents), for the streams that course down the face of Pichincha are abundant. An Indian scrubbed out the pool with a broom fashioned from a bundle of fagots, and turned it full of a water so clear that I could have read a newspaper at the bottom. But the heating apparatus was not particularly effective. When the icy mountain water had filled the stone basin, cold as only a shaded spot at this altitude can be, the uninured gringo could only grit his teeth, clutch desperately at his 60-cent bar of imported English soap, and plunge in—and quickly out again. One such experience was enough to explain why Quito shows so decided an aversion to the bath.

My residence in the city was all but nipped in the bud by a mere matter of red tape. Again the shock was administered at the post-office. When I presented the registry slips for the package of notes on which my proposed volume depended, they were all there, sure enough, the seals still unbroken. But as I opened them for customs inspection, the startled employees cried out in horrified chorus:

“SeÑor, it is against the law to send manuscript by mail in Ecuador!”

“These were mailed in the United States, where it is not against the law.”

“No importa! It is illegal for them to ride in the Ecuadorian mails. They will have to be confiscated by the government.”

“What can the government do with them?” I asked, innocently.

“Burn them, of course,” replied the clerk.

Luckily the laws of Ecuador are not so inexorable and incorruptible as those of some other lands, but I passed a far from pleasant hour before I discovered that saving fact. Just where the line is drawn between “manuscrito” and mere letters, I was never able to learn. At any rate the sender of the offending notes is still “wanted,” I believe, to serve a year in the penitentiary of Quito.

I had not been three days in the city of the equator when I began to feel the necessity for exercise. The “best families” lead a very sedentary and physically idle existence, virtually spending their lives at the bottom of a hole in the ground, for such the central plaza and the few adjoining squares about which it is customary to stroll might be called. Yet there are innumerable views and picturesque corners to reward him who will climb out; and climb he must, for the city lies in a fold of the skirts of Pichincha, out of which almost every street mounts more or less steeply.

The main plaza is the heart of Ecuador. In its center, instead of the “handsome brass fountain” of Stevenson’s day, rises a tall, showy monument topped by a bronze Victory or Liberty, or some other exotic bird, while at its base cringes an allegorical Spanish lion with a look of pained disgust on his face and an arrow through his liver. Much of the square is floored with cement, blinding to the eyes under the equatorial sun and only mildly relieved by staid and too carefully tended plots where violets, pansies, yellow poppies, and many a flower known only to the region bloom perennially. Its diagonal walks see most of Quito pass at least once a day. But neither Indians nor the ragged classes pause to sit on its grass-green benches; nor may anyone carrying a bundle pass its gates—unless the guard chances to be doing something other than his appointed duty. On the east the square is flanked by the two-story government “palace,” housing the presidency, the ministry, both houses of congress, the custom-house, Ecuador’s main post-office, and considerable else, yet still finding room for several cubby-hole shops under its portico. To the south, siding on, rather than facing the square, its towers barely rising above the roof, is the low cathedral, in which are the tombs both of Sucre and his reputed assassin, Flores, the “Washington of Ecuador.” The third and fourth sides are flanked by the archbishop’s palace and the municipality, both with portales, arcades beneath which are dozens of little den-like shops, and filled from pillar to pillar with hawkers and their no less motley wares.

Every street of the city is roughly cobbled, with a row of flagstones along its center for Indian carriers and four-footed beasts of burden, and on either side a narrow, slanting slab-stone walk on which the pedestrian whose appearance suggests the lower social standing is expected to yield the passage. Rambling over a rolling, at times almost hilly site, every street is due sooner or later to run off into the air on a hillside, or to fade suddenly away into a noisome lane.

Quito has no residential section. Its chiefly two-story buildings are, with rare exceptions, constructed of mud blocks on frames of chaguarquero, the light, pithy stalk of the giant cactus, with roofs of the familiar dull-red tiles. Whitewash and paint of many colors strive in vain to conceal this plebeian material, and many a faÇade is gay with ornamentation. Well-to-do people, who are commonly the owners of the building they dwell in, occupy the second floor. The lower story of the city is the business section. That portion of the house facing the street is almost certain to be given over to from one to several shops, the patio serving as a yard for the loading and unloading of pack-animals, while the bare adobe cells opening on it house the family servants and Indian retainers. To dwell almost anywhere in Quito is to live in the upper air of a combination of slums and business houses, and whatever the wealth or boasted aristocracy of a family, it is certain to come into daily contact with the unwashed gente del pueblo that inhabits its lower regions and performs its menial tasks.

There are shops enough in Quito, to all appearances, to supply the demands, if not the needs, of all the million and a half inhabitants of Ecuador. These are, for the most part, small, one-room dungeons without windows, flush with the sidewalk, with no other front than the doors that stand wide open during business hours, and present at other times their blank faces ornamented with several enormous padlocks. The quiteÑo puts no trust in the small locks of modern days. Many a shop, the entire stock of which is not worth a hundred dollars, is protected not only by bolts and bars within, but by half a dozen of those huge and clumsy contrivances that the rest of the world used in the Middle Ages. To “shut up shop” is a real task in Quito, of which the lugging home of the enormous keys is by no means the least burdensome. Naturally, if a real burglar cared to take the trouble to journey to Quito, he would find far less difficulty at his trade than in a city ostensibly less secure.

Besides the establishments of hundreds of men who would rather wear a white collar than work, there are innumerable little holes in the wall, run by “women of the people” in conjunction with their scanty household duties, where chicha and stronger drinks, and the few foodstuffs of the Indians and the poorer classes are displayed—and sometimes sold, though there are barely customers enough to go round. Clothing stores, or more exactly, cloth-shops, are perhaps most numerous, countless useless duplications of the selfsame stock, with hundreds of bolts of as many different weaves piled high in the open doorways. Every merchant, however meager his supplies, announces himself an “importer and exporter,” and after morning mass manto-wrapped women wander for hours from shop to shop, haggling for a fancied difference of a half cent in some purchase which, in the end, is more apt than not to be abandoned. Business is petty at best; its ethics low, and the native quiteÑo is a weak competitor of the foreigners that swarm in the city. Italians, especially the wily Neapolitan, and “Turks,” as the ubiquitous Syrians are called in all South America, capture much of the trade. A foreigner remains a foreigner in Ecuador, for the country has but weak powers of assimilation.

A unique note in the life of Quito are the “Propiedad” signs. Revolution, with its accompanying looting, is ever imminent. The native shopkeepers are frankly at the mercy of the looters, who only too often are the Government itself. But the foreigner despoiled of his wares can always lodge a complaint with his home Government; reparation may follow, and even the punishment of the looters is conceivable. To warn these of their peril, and to induce sober thought in times of anarchy, the foreign merchant paints on his shop-front a huge flag of his country, similar to that used by neutral steamers in wartime, with surcharged words conveying the same information to those unacquainted with the colors. Thus the German’s place of business is distinguished with a:

(black)
PROPIEDAD

(white)
ALEMANA

(red)

The family of “Don Panchito” with whom I lived in Quito. In front stands little Mercedes, familiarly known as “Meech,” our house-maid and general servant

Girls of the “gente decente” class of Quito, in a school run by European nuns. The Mother Superior (right) is Belgian; the nun on the left is Irish

Within a few blocks of the main plaza may be noted the following “Propiedades”: “EspaÑola, Francesa, Alemana, Belga, Danesa, Inglesa, Italiana, Holondesa, Sueca, Chilena, Colombiana, Peruana, Venezolana, Turca,” and one or two more. The Stars and Stripes and the words “Propiedad Americana” appear only once—on the door of a small export house.

Apparently every one is entitled to three guesses on the population of Quito. The estimates range from fifty to a hundred thousand, with the truth probably somewhere near the seventy-five thousand attributed to it in Stevenson’s day. Its tendency of late years has been to overflow its banks; the suburb of Guarico climbs a considerable way up the skirts of Pichincha, and the huts of Indians have scrambled well up the flanks of the other enclosing ridges. Though more in touch with the outside world than BogotÁ, it has much the same atmosphere of a world apart, a peaceful, restful little sphere supplied with a few modern conveniences of a crude, break-down-often sort, but with little of the complicated life of twentieth-century cities. It is a splendid place to play at life, to lie fallow and catch up with oneself, with nothing more exciting to stir up existence than the semi-weekly concert in the plaza mayor. A score of carriages rattle over its cobbled streets; the rails of a tramway line had been laid years before our arrival, but the cars had not yet been ordered. Somewhere there may be a finer climate, but it would scarcely be worth while going far to look for it. Standing at a height which, in the temperate zone, would be covered by eternal snows, the city is sheltered by the surrounding ranges from the bitter chill that descends so often upon less lofty BogotÁ. In the Colombian capital we were always suffering more or less from cold in our waking hours, except at midday; in Quito it was possible to sit comfortably on a plaza bench at midnight. With all the stages of nature, from planting through blossoms, fruit, and harvest, existing side by side, its days are like the best half-dozen culled from a northern May. There is a popular saying that it rains thirteen months a year in Quito. But this is slander. During my long stay, there were, to be sure, few days when it did not rain; but the shower came almost always at a more or less fixed hour of the afternoon, and the resident soon learned to make his plans accordingly. The rain seemed heavier than it was in reality, for tin spouts pour the water noisily out into the cobbled streets, the wide, projecting eaves protecting the sidewalks. Now and then came a day heavy with massed clouds; far more often all but an hour or so was brilliant with sunshine.

Yet an American schoolma’am accustomed to tell her pupils that the people of Quito all dress in white because it lies on the equator, would be startled to see what attention even a woman in light-colored garb attracts in its streets. On rare occasions a man in white cotton passed through the overcoated plaza during the evening concert; but this meant only that the tri-weekly train from Guayaquil had arrived. We met, too, an American “drummer,” more noted for his ability as a “mixer” than for his knowledge of geography, who had arrived with a carefully chosen wardrobe of white linen suits—and proved a godsend to the local tailors. Incidentally, he had come down to introduce American plumbing in Ecuador; but that is another and still sadder story. The truth is that moderate winter clothing is never out of place in the city of the equator. Even at noon, with one’s shadow a round disk under foot and the sun glaring to the eyes and burning the skin in this thin, upland air, a leisurely climb up one of the longest streets brought no memories of the tropics.

As in all high altitudes, there is a marked difference between sunshine and shade. The first greeting in a quiteÑo house is sure to be “CÚbrese usted” (“Put on your hat”), and however impolite it may seem to the newcomer, none but the unwise will disregard the suggestion. Only when one has become acclimated to the room may one uncover with impunity, for to catch cold in Quito is a serious matter, and the road from a cold to pneumonia is short and swift in this thin air. Thanks to the altitude, it is the common experience of newcomers to be either unduly exhilarated or sunk in the depths of despondency.

There is not a chimney in Quito, and no breath of smoke is ever known to smudge her transparent equatorial sky. Factories, in the modern sense, are unknown; cooking is the same simple operation as in the rural districts of the Andes. The quiteÑo knows artificial heat, if at all, only by hearsay. I chanced to be in the reception-room of the Minister of Foreign Affairs one afternoon when a newly appointed Argentine ambassador dropped in for his first informal call. In the course of the polished small-talk that ensued, the diplomat mentioned a new law in Buenos Aires requiring the heating of public buildings during certain months of the year. The Minister, an unusually well-educated man for Ecuador, stared a moment with a puzzled expression, then leaning forward with undiplomatic eagerness, replied:

“Why, I suppose you would have to have some kind of artificial heat in those cold countries!”

From the center of the city itself not one of the snow-clad volcanoes that encircle it like the tents of a besieging army are visible; but a climb to the rim of the basin in any direction leads to some point of vantage overlooking all Quito and its surroundings. Of a score of far-reaching views, that is perhaps most striking from the summit of the Panecillo. The “Little Loaf” that bottles up the town on the south is well-named; it resembles nothing so much as a fat biscuit, lush green in its covering of perpetual spring. Antiquarians have never agreed whether the Panecillo is a natural hill, or partly or wholly built by man. Geologically it is out of place, for all the rest of the region is rocky and broken, and nowhere else in the vicinity has nature constructed any symmetrical thing. Some have it that an already existing hill was rounded off before the Conquest, as a pedestal for the Temple of the Sun which tradition asserts adorned the summit long before the coming of the Incas. If it is entirely man-built, the construction of the pyramids was an afternoon sport in comparison. Somehow the imagination likes to picture thousands of Indians of both sexes and all ages jogging like lines of tropical ants up and down the sacred mound, with baskets of earth on their uncomplaining backs, as they still trot to-day through the streets of Quito under loads of every description.

A road runs round and round the Panecillo, making two full revolutions in so leisurely and dignified a manner that it would seem almost level did not the city below open out more and more with each step forward. At the summit, across which sweeps a never-failing wind from the south, is a view worth many times such a climb. All Quito lies huddled in its pocket below, like the body of a dull-red spider with its legs cut off at varying lengths. The city is clearly visible in its every detail, from the very roof-tiles of its houses to the gay-colored ponchos of the Indians, crawling like minute specks across its squares and along its ditch-like streets. Along the earth-wrinkle at the base of Pichincha’s long ridge are glimpses of small villages, and countless little green fields, standing edge-up on the flank of the range, seem so close at hand as to be almost within touch. Here the early riser may watch the birth of clouds. At sunrise the Andes stand out sharp and clear, as if the sky had been carefully swept during the night. Then a tiny patch of mist detaches itself here and there from the damp flanks of Pichincha, streaks of steel-gray clouds begin to rise under the warming sun, like a curtain drawn from the bottom; soon the entire ridge is steaming from end to end, and before one’s very eyes come into being and float away across the world those masses of clouds that greet the late riser full-grown.

In the transparent air of the highlands the eye embraces far more than the city. The surrounding world, being above the tree-line, is bare of any vegetation other than the brown bunch-grass; as would be the city and its environs, also, but for the thousands of eucalyptus trees imported in the days of GarcÍa Moreno. Swinging round the circle, one catches sight of a dozen famous volcanoes, all more or less capped with snow. Almost due north rises the glacier-clad bulk of Cayambe, squatted squarely on the equator, perhaps forty miles away, yet seeming just over the ridge beyond the city. Near it, jagged Cotacache pierces the blue heavens. Further around comes Antisana, then Sincholagua, the giant that not many years ago blew its head off in a fit of rage. To the east stands Pasochoa, close followed by RumiÑaui, the “Stony-Eyed,” of the same name as the Inca-quiteÑo general who continued the war against the Spaniards after the capture of Atahuallpa. Over its shoulder peers the tip of Cotapaxi; little Corazon comes next, with Iliniza striving in vain to hide behind it, until finally the eye has swung back to the broad flanks of Pichincha, up which clamber Indian huts, like captive turtles striving to escape from their enclosing basin. Above them two ragged rock and lava peaks, often streaked with snow, the Rucu and Guagua (“Man” and “Baby”) Pichincha, invisible from the city itself, stand forth close at hand against the chill steel-blue of the upland sky. Pichincha is rated a dead volcano, having given no signs of life since 1660; but the early history of Quito is strewn with its ashes and destruction. QuiteÑos are much given to bewailing their “triste” landscape; yet few of her canvases has Nature painted with so masterly a hand.

Three weeks after our arrival Hays burst in upon me one morning with the information that the bundles we had mailed in Jirardot had come. Well on in the afternoon the post-office officials saw fit to lay them before us. A ragged boy cut the strings and spread out the contents for customs inspection. This over, we were preparing to carry them off, when we were halted by the grunt of an official deep in some long arithmetical process at a nearby desk. By and by he rose and pushed toward each of us a long list of figures:

MercancÍas (Merchandise)—8500 grams.
Derechos (Duty) thereon at $2 a kilogram	$ 17.00
MÁs 100% (Plus 100%)	17.00
Defensa Nacional	1.70
Aforro	1.57
Muellaje (wharfage)	2.23
Bodega (storage).	.93
Brokerage	2.30
Timbre (stamp)	.15
Total	$ 42.88

“These are personal belongings, chiefly clothing, all more or less worn,” I began, scenting a long controversy.

“True, seÑor.”

“You surely do not ask us to pay duty on personal baggage? Travelers arrive at Guayaquil every week with several trunks, and pay no duty.”

“Only that is baggage which the traveler personally brings in with him. The charges are $42.88—for each, seÑores, since the parcels are of the same weight.”

“But you can see for yourself that they are marked ‘Value $7.’”

“The law goes by weight only, seÑor.”

“Why the 100% addition?”

“The new law requires all duties to be levied twice.”

“And this third item?”

“For the up-keep of the national army and navy.”

“Well, what is this aforro?”

“That is the freight from PanamÁ.”

“But the postage was prepaid from Jirardot to Quito—one dollar. Doesn’t Ecuador belong to the Postal Union?”

“Naturally, seÑor, but by a special treaty with the United States parcel-post packages pay freight across the Isthmus, and from PanamÁ to here.”

“And this muellaje—?”

“The landing charges in the port of Guayaquil. Bodega is for warehouse storage charges—”

“But the bundles came through in a mail-bag, without so much as entering a warehouse.”

“Those are fixed charges, irrespective of special conditions. The brokerage covers my fee here in the office, and the stamp is that which you see on the document here. The total charges are $42.88.”

“Keep ’em,” growled Hays, turning away. “Make a present of them to your president, or dress up one of your statues of Liberty.” Naturally, he spoke in English, for we still planned to live some time in Quito.

As we reached the door, a word from the official caused us to turn back. He was up to his ears in another set of figures.

“We can call it cotton instead of clothing,” he said, presenting a new list; “then the charges will be only $12.25.”

“Make it old clothing,” suggested Hays.

“The law mentions clothing, without qualifications,” replied the official, with that patient courtesy that is the chief virtue of his race.

“The bundles do not weigh that, anyway,” I persisted. “Most of it is in the wrappings.”

“The law specifies bulk, not net weight.”

“Keep them, with our compliments,” growled Hays, turning away.

“I’ll tell you what you can do, seÑores,” suggested the official; “Go buy a stamped sheet of government paper at thirty cents and write the Director of Posts—”

“Why can’t we write him on ordinary paper?”

“It would not be legal. Go buy a thirty-cent stamped paper and put a ten-cent stamp on it—”

“What’s that for?”

“For the up-keep of the national army. Write the Director of Posts reclaiming the duty you have paid—”

“After we have paid it?” cried Hays. “Hardly! I have had too much experience with Latin-American governments.”

In the end we bought the stamped paper and wrote the director, leaving the letter with the official, who promised to forward it to his chief—to-morrow. As the bundles contained some rather indispensable odds and ends, and because I wished to investigate Ecuadorian government processes to the bottom, I followed the matter up. Next day we called twice at the post-office and finally, late in the afternoon, signed a blank request to be given the packages duty free, without which, it appeared, the matter could not be officially considered. Two days later we were informed that a junta had been ordered to meet and pass on the case; there being no precedent for action. A week passed. The junta showed no ability to get together. I took up the quest again—and spent an afternoon in gaining admittance to the sanctum of the Director of Posts. He was courtesy itself, but the gist of his remarks was:

“That is not baggage which comes in by mail. It is only legally so when it crosses the frontier with its owner. However, if you wish, you might call on the Minister of Public Instruction—who happens to be also at the present time acting Minister of the Interior, to which department the matter refers—and ask to have the bundles passed as baggage.”

I spent the better part of two days in the anteroom of the Ministry, a sumptuous pink and blue adobe chamber with a score of bullet holes in the walls—mementoes of the latest request of the populace for the resignation of the president—only to learn:

“The law mentions no difference between old and new clothing; between fresh and soiled linen. All clothing entering Ecuador—except as baggage—pays the same duty; hence I see no way you can avoid it.”

I did not succeed in getting the matter before Congress—officially, at least—though I only missed taking it up with the president through an oversight of one of his aids. In the end I paid the $6.25 to which, by some strange manipulation, the post-office official had reduced the charges, and carried the object of controversy home to the calle Flores.

These small countries of tropical America remind one less of nations than of groups of polite bandits who have taken possession of a few mountains and valleys that they may levy tribute on whoever falls into their hands. All of them have imitated larger powers by enacting a “protective tariff,” without even the scant excuse that has been bloated into a reason for it in other lands; for here there is no industry to “protect.” Here it is not the lobbies of large financial interests that are back of the movement, but the politicians who constitute the “government”; the tariffs are “for revenue only”—largely for the pockets of the politicians themselves. We of more powerful nations hardly realize what it means to live in so small a country as Ecuador, until it is brought home by some such incident as hearing the entire Congress debating several hours on the question of whether two new electric-light bulbs shall or shall not be placed in front of the government “palace.”

Religiously, Quito is still in the Middle Ages. Looked down upon from any point of vantage, it has the aspect of an ecclesiastical capital. It would scarcely be an exaggeration to say that half the city is taken up by the Church. Besides its many bulking “temples” and innumerable chapels, enormous sections of the town are swallowed up within the confines of convents and monasteries. The largest is San Francisco, reputed the most extensive in America. The Franciscans got in on the ground floor in Quito. The ink with which the city was founded was barely dry when three monks of that order arrived afoot and breathless from Guayaquil; to be given an immense grant of land running far up the flanks of Pichincha. The great stone cloisters were a century in building; a veritable Chinese Wall of brick, backed by clustered hovels of the poor, encloses what would have been six city blocks, and the holdings of the order in haciendas and other rich properties spread far and wide over Ecuador. During the irruption of Pichincha in 1575, the Franciscans won the perennial worship of the masses by the simple method of raising aloft the Hostia and commanding the flow of lava to cease—and continuing to hold it aloft until the command was obeyed. To-day they still loll under such withered laurels.

Two youths of Quito’s “best families” accompanied me to San Francisco. A monk in brown greeted my companions as befitted their high rank and potential power of beneficence; yet with an undercurrent of insincerity and of dislike for these sons of “Liberals,” which he was unable wholly to conceal. We passed through several flowery patios musical with fountains and surrounded by pillared arcades, off which opened large, vaulted chambers, to an Elysian orchard under the trees of which a score of well-fed, well-slept monks strolled in pastoral contentment far from the hubbub and cares of the modern world. Cigarette butts littered the floor of a kiosk in the center; scarcely a face was to be seen in which the signs of frequent debauch could not plainly be read. The walls and ceiling of the adjoining church were so covered with gold that the imagination harked back to the ransom of Atahuallpa. My companions whispered that an American had recently offered $15,000 for the privilege of removing what remained of the genuine metal, promising to regild the church so expertly that the transaction would never be detected. The offer had been considered, but declined when some suspicion of the deal reached the public ear. The monks were still open to similar propositions, however. Over a door of the monastery hung an old painting of “MarÍa Dolorosa” by a famous Spanish artist. One of my companions, himself a painter of some ability, offered a tempting sum for permission to replace the “dusty old thing” with a brand new copy; and the impression left by a deal of murmuring and pantomime was that the offer would eventually be accepted.

Ecuadorian soldiers before the national “palace”

Quito does not put its faith in small locks and keys. Many a shop containing hardly $100 worth of goods has a half-dozen padlocks and interior bolts

When we asked permission to climb to the tower for a view of the town, however, the monk gave us a quick, sidelong glance and regretted that the Father Superior no longer permitted it. My companions exchanged winks, but found no opportunity to enlighten me until we had taken our ceremonious leave. Once outside I learned—to my astonishment—that not merely foreigners resent having each night’s sleep broken up into a series of detached naps by the unearthly din of Quito’s church-bells. A few months before, several young men of the well-to-do class had formed a conspiracy to taste the unknown luxury of one night of unbroken slumber. Gaining admission on various pretexts to all the church-towers of the city, the conspirators had stolen the badajos—clappers, I believe we call them in English—and got rid of them so effectually that few were ever discovered. The priests were distracted—until their faithful henchmen of the masses had replaced the pilfered property with pieces of railroad iron. Since then the church-towers had been closed to the educated youth of the city.

Not far from San Francisco rises the florid faÇade of “La CompaÑÍa.” The Jesuits reached the present capital of Ecuador a bit later than many of their competitors, but they quickly overcame the handicap. They established the first boticas, or drug-stores, and brooked no competition. Besides enormous tracts of the most fertile land in the colony, they were granted a monopoly of cattle-breeding and, being free from taxes and the necessity of paying the King’s share, and holding the Indians in virtual slavery at less than a nominal wage, most of which returned to their coffers in the form of church tithes and levies, they easily choked private competition and soon outdistanced in wealth even the Franciscans. Their expulsion from Spanish soil greatly reduced their power and holdings. To-day, what was once a part of their monastery is occupied by the University and the National Library, but they are still scarcely cramped for space. An Alsatian Jesuit, of an esthetical cast of countenance in striking contrast to his Ecuadorian brothers, led me fearlessly even into the belfry. He was a plainspoken man, for all his astuteness—or perhaps by reason of it—and openly bewailed the immorality of the native friars and what he called the “silly superstitions” of the people. The dormitories of the boarding-school within the monastery were divided into small cells by low wooden partitions covered with chicken-wire, like the ten-cent lodging-houses of Chicago. Before I had time to put a question, the Alsatian explained:

“In these countries we must keep the boys locked in their own rooms at night, for morality’s sake.”

It is more than unusual in Latin-America, but at least one enterprising pupil found it possible to “work his way” through the colegio of the Jesuit Fathers of Quito. His fame was still green among the gilded youths of the city. By the rules of the institution each student is required to go to confession once a week. The enterprising lad long relieved his comrades of the unpleasant formality by impersonating each in turn before the perforated disk—at the equivalent of fifty cents a head.

Merced, Corazon, Buen Pastor, San AugustÍn, Santa Barbara, Santa Clara, Carmen Antigua, Carmen Moderno, San Juan ... to name all the orders that occupy huge spaces within the city of Quito would be like writing an ecclesiastical directory. Down at the end of the calle Flores the Dominicans dwell in a monastery little less extensive than that of the Franciscans. Their wealth may be surmised from the fact that in colonial days they held the monopoly of supplying all liquor used in “divine worship” throughout the colony. In the center of the Plaza Santo Domingo is a statue of Sucre, companion of BolÍvar in the wars of Spanish-American independence,—a splendid bronze of an imaginary Hercules that should be set up in some gymnasium as a model—concerning which there runs a tale suggestive of local conditions. Soon after its erection an Indian living far up the mountainside above the suburb of Guarico lost his pig. He tried every known means of recovering the animal,—prayed to every available saint with any reputation for miracles, squandered his meager substance in burning candles before every shrine in Quito, and purchased many a priestly prayer. All in vain; the pig was not to be found. At length a quiteÑo—whether a wag or a sincere believer is not reported—whispered to the distracted Indian that the most powerful saint of all was the new one in the Plaza Santo Domingo. The credulous fellow lost no time on his way to the square, where he knelt with a lighted candle on either side of him before the pedestal of the Hero of Ayacucho. When he looked up from his first invocation he noted that the statue was pointing to the battlefield on which its original defeated the Spaniards, far up the slope of Pichincha, which chanced also to be the location of the Indian’s hut. He hurried homeward and, sure enough, found the pig in a hollow not far from his dwelling. Since then “Saint Sucre” has had a great vogue with the Indian populace of Quito.

It would be out of place to enumerate the many proofs, from personal experiences to matters of common knowledge, from national literature to frequent notorious scandals, of the moral laxity of the quiteÑo priesthood. Whatever they may be elsewhere, celibacy and the confessional are undeniably ill-chosen institutions for a race of Ecuadorian caliber. The non-Catholic would not dream of berating the churchmen in any such terms as those which frequently fall from the lips of educated men of Quito. More than once I have heard a devout quiteÑa mother bewail the fact that she dare not send her daughter to confession, though convinced that the ceremony was requisite to the saving of her soul. One looks in vain for any connection whatever between religion and morality in this typical Andean capital. The sanctimonious old beatas, wrapped in their black mantos, who haunt the churches and accompany every religious procession with tears of hysterical ecstasy coursing down their cheeks are not infrequently procurers and go-betweens of the human vultures that dwell in, as well as out of, the monasteries. The street-walkers of Quito are almost all fervent mass-goers. Scores of the same faces that peer invitingly out upon the passerby at night may be seen next morning kneeling on the pavement of the cathedral or walking on their knees around the entire circle of plaster saints, reciting a prayer formula before each. Nor is this hypocrisy. These victims see no incongruity between the evening’s doings and the morning’s occupation. To the masses, religion is a mixture of idol worship and the performance of fixed ceremonies, wholly divorced from their personal actions. The sins of daily life are wiped out by a quarter-hour in the confessional; absolution is granted for the payment of a fee and the performance of a set devotion. The brain cells where real morality might find a foothold are packed with absurd catechisms that leave no room for it; and of religion there remains nothing but unthinking costumbre and unreasoning fanaticism.

Quito has been called the most fanatical town of South America. Among a score like it, the present archbishop tells the following story in his “History of Ecuador.” About two hundred years ago some one broke into one of the churches and stole the sacred wafers, together with the gold ciborium in which they were kept. A few days later the stolen property was found lying in the refuse of a ditch. Amid great weeping, a procession of the entire population bore the sacred emblem back to its church. For weeks the whole town dressed in deepest mourning; the audiencia gave all its attention and the police force all its efforts to running down those “vile traitors, bestial swine, and venial sinners,” as the gentle archbishop calls them, leaving little misdemeanors like robbery and murder to look after themselves. Not a clue was uncovered. At length a famous Jesuit of the time preached a sermon that lashed the populace into such fervor that the congregation poured forth into the streets beating themselves with chains and scourges, most of them, men and women, naked to the waist—I am quoting the archbishop—in a procession and religious fury that lasted from eight at night until two in the morning. A scapegoat was imperative. The officers of the audiencia, in peril of being themselves forced to assume that rÔle, redoubled their efforts, and at length found, some distance south of the city, three Indians and a half-caste who were reputed to have confessed to the nefarious crime. The four miscreants were brought back to the city, kicked about the streets by the populace, trussed up in chains in the church while the priest preached a four-hour sermon on “the most atrocious crime in the history of Quito,” and were finally hanged, drawn, and quartered, and hung up, still dripping with blood, in sixteen parts of the town. The priests and their followers dug up a potful of earth where the holy wafers had been found, and deposited it in a heavy vase of solid gold that is still one of the precious relics of the cathedral. Then they caused to be erected over the spot the chapel of Jerusalem, where it stands to this day. “And,” adds the archbishop, “no fiel [faithful one] will deny that they met their just fate for so vile and unprecedented a sacrilege.”

A corner of Quito—looking through a garbage-hole into one of the many ravines by which the city is broken up

Ah, but that was two centuries ago. True, but permit me to bring the fanaticism of Quito up to date. Less than a year before our arrival the perennial struggle between the Liberals and the Conservatives, the latter the church party, had broken out again in revolution. A queer-looking little man, with a white goatee sprouting from a mild-tempered chin, and wearing habitually a hat that would have been the envy of a slap-stick comedian, had for years been president of Ecuador. He had stolen unusually little for a Latin-American president, and had not allowed his friends to steal more than the average. Moreover, he had done the country much service, among other things having induced an American to complete the railroad from the coast to Quito. Also he had curtailed some of the unbridled graft of the church; and strangely enough the church had resented that species of reform and turned the power of the Conservatives against him. To be sure, the queer little man had objected to surrendering his office to a newly elected incumbent; but that is a common South American peccadillo. When the populace rose and drove him out, he went down to the coast and gathered an army of his fellow-costeÑos. But luck had deserted him. After a few battles he was captured, together with several sons, nephews, and henchmen. The Conservatives were triumphant. The Government ordered the captives to be sent up to Quito. The general in command at Guayaquil protested that such action was unsafe until the fury of the populace evaporated. The Government assured him the danger was visionary, and repeated the order. A special train was made up, and set out on the long climb to the plateau. That was on a Saturday. Next morning a priest, noted for his virulent eloquence, preached a sermon that lashed the church-going masses into fury. At noon word came that the train had arrived, and the prisoners hurried by automobile to the PanÓptico, the wheel-shaped penitentiary up on the lower flanks of Pichincha. The populace quickly gathered. The bullet-holes through the false stone walls of the dismal little mud cells, in the narrow corners of which the prisoners crouched, were still fresh when we wandered through the place, months later. Among the most fanatical of the mob were the police and those whose duty it was to guard the prison. In the excitement some twoscore prisoners escaped, and joined the rioters. The little ex-president and his companions, dead or dying, were stripped naked, ropes were tied to their ankles, and they were dragged for hours through the cobbled streets of Quito, the frenzied populace raising the echoes of the surrounding ranges with shouts of, “Long Live the Church!” “Viva la Virgen MarÍa!”

I have two photographs taken by Don JesÚs, nephew of my host, from the window of what was later my own room, as the bodies of the former president and his eldest son were passing. They show a throng made up exclusively of cholos, those of mixed blood, who constitute the bulk of Quito’s population. Not a white collar of the gente decente or the broad felt hat of an Indian is to be seen. On through the entire length of the city the barbaric procession continued. Near the Plaza San Blas a swarm of the lowest women in town descended with knives from their hovels and carried off gruesome mementoes of the orgy. At length the mob reached the Ejido, the broad, green playground of Quito, where they hacked in pieces the bodies of the victims with machetes and whatever implement came to hand. Some carried to their huts as souvenirs the heads of the ex-president and his sons, from which they were recovered with difficulty only after the frenzy had died down and been slept off. The rest was piled in heaps and burned. Such were los arrastres (“the draggings”), to which the educated quiteÑo refers, if at all, in shamed undertones.

Quito is not so light of complexion as BogotÁ. Not merely is her percentage of Indian blood higher, but even those of unmixed European ancestry have a sallow or olive tint, and little of the color in their cheeks frequent in the more rigorous capital of Colombia. Negroes are unknown as residents. There is a careful gradation in caste, yet chiefly a void in place of what, in other lands, would be a middle class. The population is divided rather sharply between those brutalized from carrying ox-loads on their backs, and those who remain soft and effeminate from careful avoidance of any muscular exertion. For even the cholo is economically either Indian or white, depending on his wealth or occupation. To carry even a small package through the streets is to jeopardize one’s standing as a member of the upper class. “Don’t hurry,” a frock-tailed quiteÑo told me in all seriousness one day. “People will think you are ocupado,” busy, that is, with vulgar work. It is customary to raise one’s hat to every male acquaintance “of your own class or above,” to pause and shake hands with every one considered your equal, to ask him how he has amanecido (“dawned”), to inquire after his family individually, and to shake hands again before parting; and that as often as you meet him, though it be every half-hour during the day. Americans who have lived long in South America have the hand-shaking habit chronically. The greeting, or more exactly the acknowledgment of the greeting, of one’s inferior varies from a patronizing heartiness to the corner tailor to a half-audible grunt to an Indian. The latter is always addressed in the “tu” form, “because,” as one of my Beau Brummel acquaintances put it, “there is no reason whatever to show any respect to the Indian.” During several months’ acquaintance I found no great reason to show any to the speaker; but that, perhaps, is beside the point.

How wholly lacking the place is in genuine democracy is frequently illustrated. I was strolling in the plaza mayor one day, for instance, with the grandson of the “Washington of Ecuador,” a youth of American school training and of unusually high standards, when he stepped on the flagging surrounding the central monument. The cholo policeman on guard hesitated, but finally screwed up unusual courage and informed the youth in a courteous, not to say humble, manner that he had been ordered not to let any one walk on the flagging. The descendant of Ecuador’s founder turned a brilliant red, as if his noble house had been vilely insulted, then so white that his blond hair seemed to become dark brown. He strode across to the officer, who was considerably larger than he, caught him by the coat, and all but jerked him off his feet. The policeman abjectly apologized. The “best people” of Quito do not realize that it is not the individual policeman, their “inferior,” giving them orders, but lawful and orderly society speaking through him.

As in the days of Stevenson’s travels, a century ago, “the principal occupation of persons of rank is visiting their estates, particularly at harvest-time.” By far the greater portion of the year they spend in town, however, leaving their haciendas in charge of mayordomos little acquainted with modern agricultural methods. The city has so few recreative attractions that it is hard for a man of education to avoid a more or less studious life, be it only as a pastime. Yet Quito does not even aspire to rival BogotÁ as the “Athens of South America.” Ecuador is not without her literature, but it has come from other towns more frequently than from the capital. The game of politics, not without its perils, engrosses the attention of many. Then, as in most Latin-American countries, not a few dissipate their energies in the “pursuit of pleasure” of a rather specific kind. So assiduously does the average quiteÑo devote himself to this from early youth that it is not strange that an old man of the decente class is rarely seen. There is a considerable provincialism, even among the best educated classes. I heard often such questions as “What is a sleigh?” “When is summer?” The story is well vouched for that a congressman asked a colleague just back from abroad, “Can a man get to Europe in three weeks on a good mule?”

The women of the well-dressed class in Quito are less given to the display of mustaches than those of BogotÁ. Not a few are distinctly attractive, particularly in early youth. In later life too many suggest in their features some years of a rather harrowing existence. Outspoken quiteÑos lay this condition at the door of the priests and friars, but mere economic pressure probably plays at least as considerable a part. The up-keep of so many enormous ecclesiastical institutions cannot but drain the resources of so stagnant a city. Wealth does not abound, and feminine opportunity to earn a livelihood is narrowly restricted. It is not strange, then, if more than one family still rated in the gentle decente class remains with no other barrier against starvation than the youthful freshness of its daughters. In most parts of the world a glance suffices to distinguish a woman of public life from her respected sisters. In Quito it is not so easy. Indeed, there seems to be no hard and fast line between the two classes. Certain undercurrents suggest a tacit admission that some families have only one means of tiding over their existence until a lucky turn of politics, or of the lottery wheel, sets them on their feet again. Then, if the girl’s career has not been too public, she may be bestowed on a husband of a somewhat lower social level.

Let me not leave the impression of a general laxity among the women of Quito. The sheltered daughters of the most responsible classes are models of modesty and domesticity. But he who dwells any length of time in the city would be blind to overlook certain facts, be they the result of an impoverished society or more directly fostered by those ecclesiastical elements to whom the embittered men of higher rank charge them.

Thus far I have said little of the, if not most numerous, at least most conspicuous class in Quito,—the Indians. Ignoring the very considerable number in whose veins runs a greater or less percentage of aboriginal blood, those in whom it is still without admixture make up perhaps forty per cent. of the population, and give the city most of its color. There is not a house in town, from the bright-yellow, three-story adobe dwelling of the president down, without its Indians,—family servants and burden-bearers huddled in the mud cells about the cobbled patio of the lower story, or homeless wretches who lie by night in any unoccupied corner and pick up a precarious existence by day in competition with donkeys and pack-animals. Their earth-floored kennels form the tassel-ends of almost every street; they scatter out along all the highways, and dot the flanks of every range and mountain spur in the vicinity.

If they have changed since the Conquest, it is for the worse. In habits and condition they vary scarcely at all from those of the dreary Andean villages through which we had passed. Theirs is a purely animal existence. They have not the faintest notion of any line between filth and cleanliness, avoiding only that which is obviously poison, by an instinct common to the lower animals. I have seen them drink water I am sure a thirsty horse would not touch, and that despite the fact that fresh water was to be had a few yards away. They literally never wash so much as a finger, except on some such occasion as a church fiesta, when they may pause at a pool or mud-hole on the edge of town to scrub their feet with a stone. They speak a debauched dialect of Quichua, the tongue of the Incas, mixed with some words of the conquered Caras, though all understand Spanish, or at least the Indian-Spanish spoken in Quito.

Many consider the Andean Indian a debased Mongolian type, a theory not without its basis in his features. In a curious old book of the National Library of Ecuador—the “History of the Kingdom of Quito,” written in 1789, the Jesuit Padre Velasco takes up the question of the origin of the Indian and settles it—at least to his own satisfaction. To begin with, the Church has declared the inhabitants of the New World “rational,” that is, descended from Adam and Eve. That point being disposed of, it follows that “the men and animals who were found in America must be descendants of those who emerged from Noah’s ark; for does not the Bible say that all the world was covered with water? Even granted, for the sake of argument,” continues the razor-minded padre, “that the mountains of South America protruded a bit above the surface of those waters, is it conceivable that man could live for months on the highest peaks, eating snow, drinking snow, and sleeping in snow? Could he even have stood up for nearly a year on those pyramids of snow and ice?” I give it up. Ask some polar explorer. What then remains of the argument of those who still cling to the authoctonomous heresy? Obviously there is no other recourse then to admit that the ancestors of the race found their way to America by the Behring Strait, or across the Pacific from the shores of Asia.

Whatever his origin, the Indian of the Andes is a distinct reality, distinct, indeed, to all the five senses, and he varies little throughout the length of the continent. In build he is stocky and short, very muscular, with the strength of a mule for carrying loads on his back, indefatigable on foot, but weak for other labor. His color is between a tarnished copper and a more or less intense bronze. His head is large; his neck thick and long, his eyes small, black, and penetrating, yet at times strangely suggesting those of a dead fish; his nose is bulky, and somewhat flattened and spread; his teeth are white, even, and always in splendid condition; his long hair, worn sometimes flying loose, sometimes in a single braid wound with red tape, is jet-black, without luster, abundant, perfectly straight, strong and coarse as that of a horse’s mane, without even a tendency to baldness. His lips are thick and heavy, the lower one somewhat hanging, giving him a suggestion of sulkiness. His forehead is low, his mouth large, and his prominent cheek-bones and large ears give his face an appearance of great width. He is broad-shouldered, with a chest like a barrel, but slender of leg and small of foot. He grows no beard, and has almost no hair on the body.

Men and women alike, except a rare male with a sole of home-tanned leather secured by thongs, are bare-legged at least halfway to the knees, their feet, like calloused hoofs, marked by stony trails and years of barnyard wallowing. The male wears a broad, round, light-gray hat of thick felt, a kind of pajama shirt or blouse of fancily colored calico, or lienzo, a very roomy pair of “panties” of thinnest white cotton that reach anywhere from his knees to halfway to his undomesticated feet. Besides these garments, he is never seen without his ruana, or poncho, which serves him as a cloak and carry-all by day, and as a bed and covering by night. This is always of some startling, crude color, deep red predominating, with such screaming combinations as magenta and purple, carmine and yellow, though when sufficiently soiled and sun-bleached, the old rose and velvety brown, the brick red or turquoise blue, take on all the soft richness of Oriental rugs. It is this commonly homespun garment, and the corresponding one of the women, that make Quito such a color-splashed city.

The woman, too, copies the dress of her ancestors to remote generations. She wears the same hat as the male—hat-pins are unknown to her, all down the Andes—a beltless waist of coarse cloth, either open, or thin and ragged; several strips of colored bayeta (a woolish shoddy) wrapped tightly around her draft-horse hips from waist to calves in guise of skirt, always slit open on one side, showing an inner petticoat—once white—though sometimes in striking solid colors, in marked contrast to the outer skirt; and a blanket, smaller, but as audible in hue as the poncho of the male, thrown round her shoulders like a shawl. She is fond of gaudy earrings of colored glass or similar rubbish, ranging in size from large to colossal; from one to a dozen strings of cheap red beads, often the bean of a wild plant indigenous to the region, hang around her neck; generally brass rings adorn every finger; and often many beads are wound round and round her bare arms. She is completely devoid of feminine charm. She needs none, for she is amply worth her keep as a beast of burden.

As far as I know, there is no law in Quito requiring an Indian woman not to be seen without a babe in arms, or, rather, in shawl; but if one exists, it is seldom violated. In an hour I have seen, by actual count, more than three hundred female aborigines pass my window in the calle Flores, and not a score of them but bore on her back a child of from two weeks to two years of age, to say nothing of several other bundles and her whirling spindle. When the infant is tiny, it is carried lengthwise at the bottom of the blanket-shawl knotted across the mother’s chest. When it is older, it is tossed or climbs astride her broad back, lying face down, with legs spread, while she throws her outer garment about it, ties the knot on her chest—or on her forehead if the child is heavy—and trots along at her work the day through, without the least apparent notice of the offspring. The babe falls asleep, or gazes with curious, yet rather dull, eyes at the world as it speeds by, peering over the mother’s shoulder like an engineer from his cab, eats such food or refuse as falls into its hands, or plays with the mother’s tape-wound braid. The Indian woman never carries her offspring in any other manner unless, in her rÔle as a common carrier, she picks up a load too bulky or heavy to place the infant atop, such as a bedstead, a bureau, or two full-sized sacks of wheat—these are not exaggerations, but frequent cargoes—when she hangs the child in front, in the concave of her figure, like a baby kangaroo in the maternal pouch, knotting the supporting garment across her shoulders.

The youngest baby is already inconceivably dirty, yet almost always robustly healthy in appearance, though the infant mortality of the class is appalling. It is an unusual experience to hear an Indian baby cry. From its earliest years it seems to adopt that uncomplaining attitude toward life that is so marked a characteristic of the adults. Though she treats her offspring with no active unkindness—in all the years I spent in South America I have never seen an Indian mother strike a child—the aboriginal woman seems to endure it passively, like any other burden thrust upon her from which there is no escape, carrying it where it will be least troublesome, and never, at least openly, showing any caressing fondness for it. The child old enough to toddle about the streets often remains on the mother’s back, as if to hold the place for the next comer. It is a common experience to hear an Indian child ask in a perfectly fluent tongue for a serving at the maternal source of supply.

There is scant difference in appearance between the two sexes, and none whatever in their labor, except that, if there is only one load, the woman carries it, and the baby in addition. In both the half-breed and Indian classes the women are more uncleanly than the men. Like the latter, they work at all the coarser unskilled tasks, shoveling earth, mixing and carrying mortar, cobbling streets; while in the matters of loads there is nothing under two hundred pounds in weight which, once on their backs, they cannot jog along under at a kind of limping gait that seems tireless. Almost any day the furniture and entire possessions of some moving household is displayed to public gaze as it jogs through town on the backs of an Indian family. The chief water-supply of Quito is a constant string of Indians from the fountain opposite the government palace, with huge, red earthen jars sitting on their hips and supported by a thong across the forehead. It is a commonplace to meet an Indian carrying the gaudy image of some saint larger than himself. Cheap coffins of half-rotten boards, painted sky-blue or pink and decorated with strips of gilded paper, frequently mince past, secured by the brilliant poncho of the carrier, knotted across his chest. I had occasion one day to transport a typewriter a few blocks. The Indian prepared to sling it on his back with a rope. When I objected to this method, I found that the fellow not only could not carry it in his hands, but that he could not lift it to his head. When I placed it there, however, he ambled away as if he had nothing on his mind but his hat.

Frequently an entire family takes a large job, such as carrying a building from one end of town to another, adobe brick by brick. Such a one passed my window for weeks. All day long they dog-trotted back and forth in single file along the line of smooth-worn flagstones in the middle of the street, their bare feet making absolutely no sound, never a word or a sign of complaint finding outward expression. The man and woman each bore the same number of mud bricks piled on their backs, and the latter always carried the baby in her pouch, though they made a hundred trips a day. Why the infant could not have been left at one end or the other of the journey it was hard to guess. Two children, one a little fellow of five with one brick on his back, his brother of seven or eight with two, toiled all day long between father and mother, as if they were being systematically trained for the only life before them.

The Andean Indian is even less like the tall and haughty redskin of our country in manner than in appearance. Compared with him, the Mexican Indian is self-assertive, bold, and ferocious. Silent and abstracted, he takes no apparent heed of what goes on about him. Of phlegmatic temperament, a truly wooden equanimity of temper, melancholy, taciturn, and reserved, he is noted above all for a distrust that is perhaps natural, but is more likely the result of centuries of privations since the coming of the Spaniards. He has a blind submission to authority, great attachment to the house in which he lives, and is so cowardly that he lets himself be dominated by the most despicable members of other races. A complete outsider in government and public affairs, he is treated by the rest of the population like a domestic animal. The merchant of Quito who requires a carrier to deliver some bundle does not wait for one to offer himself. He steps into the street and snatches the first Indian who passes, though he be on his way to a dying parent, or preparing his child’s funeral; and the Indian performs the task as uncomplainingly as some mechanical device, and returns to wait perhaps an hour or two for the few cents the merchant chooses to give him. Only when he is drunk does the aboriginal’s manner change. Then he is garrulous and mildly disorderly. But even on a Saturday afternoon, when the highways are lined with Indians of both sexes reeling homeward, the gringo passes unnoticed, in marked contrast with the gantlet of insolence, if not, indeed, of actual danger, which he must run under like circumstances in the highlands of Mexico.

The newcomer’s sympathy for the Indian of Quito gradually evaporates with the discovery that he is utterly devoid of ambition, as completely indifferent to his own betterment as any four-footed animal. Pad out this fact with all its details and ramifications, discarding entirely the American’s ingrown tendency to imbue every human being with a striving character, and the hopelessness of the Indian’s condition will be more clearly realized. The Government of Ecuador gives scant attention to the education of the aboriginals; even if it provided schools and forced attendance, there would still remain the problem of arousing in these people any interest in, or effort for, self-improvement.

A simple episode will go far toward visualizing the temperament of the Indian of Quito, and perhaps make a bit clearer the ease with which Pizarro and his handful of tramps overthrew the Empire of the Incas. I had gone out for a stroll one afternoon along the road to Guallabamba. Some three miles from town a light rain turned me back. There were no houses near, but numbers of Indians were going and coming. A short distance ahead was a group engaged in noisy contention. Suddenly a handsome, muscular young Indian broke away and ran toward me, his long, black hair streaming out behind him. At his heels, cursing, came three cholos, in the dark hats, more sober blankets and trousers of their caste, with shorn hair and straggling suggestions of mustaches. I was not armed—one does not trouble to carry weapons about Quito—and in my bespattered road garb I had certainly no appearance of protective authority. When he reached me, however, the frightened Indian, instead of running on, turned as sharply as about a corner, and pattered along close at my heels, breathing quickly. I continued my stroll, while the drunken half-breeds, far more muscular than I, hovered about ten steps in the rear, crying:

“Ah, coward! You run to the seÑor for protection!”

Yet not a step nearer did they approach during the furlong or more that the procession lasted. Then, as we passed the entrance to an hacienda, the Indian suddenly sprinted away up its avenue of eucalyptus-trees faster than the cholos could follow. When they overtook me again, one protested in plaintive tones:

“Ah, seÑor, ese sinvergÜenza de Indio did not deserve your protection.”

Then they fell behind, while I, who had been an entirely passive actor in all the scene, strolled on into the city. It would be hard to imagine a similar incident in Mexico.

This Indian’s older daughter knocked at my door one day to say that, as it was “Don Panchito’s” birthday, the celebration in the sala next my own room would probably keep me awake all night anyway, and had I not better join the party. By eight the beating of the piano had begun. When I appeared, “Don Panchito” took me on a tour of the guests, seated in solemn quadrangle around the four walls of the room, the sexes segregated. The South American has a custom which might well be imported into our own land, to the relief of frequent embarrassment. As he was introduced, each man rose, bowed profoundly, and announced his own name in clear-cut tones,—“Enrique Burgos de Perez y Silva, servidor de usted.” The women remained seated, but made their names similarly known. A professional pianist, a patched, dishevelled, and hungry-looking young man of some Indian blood, had already begun a very nearly continuous performance at fast time, with barely two-minute intervals between the half-hour dances. In a corner sat motionless all the evening two professional chaperons—for “Don Panchito” was a widow—sour-faced, sleepy-looking old women of none too immaculate habits, wrapped in black mantos from which only nose and eyes protruded.

There were no dance cards. Each pair started in or stopped when they saw fit, quite irrespective of the others. A man stepped across the room, held out his gloved right hand to a girl, without a word, and she rose to accept an invitation that apparently could not be refused—at least, not one failed to accept it, though some of the more attractive were led out upon the floor at least fifty times in the course of the evening. Evidently it was “bad form” to carry on a conversation out of hearing of the chaperon. Neither dancer visibly spoke a word until the girl wished to stop, when she murmured “gracias” and was at once returned in silence to her seat. As the evening wore on, several young fops dropped in, alleging conflicting engagements as an excuse for their tardiness, and joined the celebration without removing their lavender gloves, which, indeed, the chilliness of the room pardoned. One of the newcomers, in particular, stirred up the ladies to almost human expressions of interest. He was son of the Minister of the Interior, just back from Paris, and lost no opportunity to display the wisdom he had gleaned in the “Capital of the World,”—a rather sharp-cornered French and an authoritative knowledge of new and more complicated manners of hopping about the floor to music. At frequent intervals our eight-year-old Indian slavey, Mercedes, familiarly known as “Meech,” arrived with fiery drinks in which we toasted “Don Panchito,” even the young girls tossing it off without a tear. At midnight the festival raged at its height. At one o’clock we sat down to dinner in a temperature far from agreeable to those of us who did not dance. Then the celebration broke out anew, though the chaperons and pianist, and even “Don Panchito,” had disappeared. The young fops removed their gloves and took turns on the stool. The clock was striking four when I retired, and little “Meech” was still serving liquid gladness as uncomplainingly and expressionlessly as ever. When I awoke at eight, she had just finished tidying up the sala, and was beginning her regular daily labors.

Gradually we made the acquaintance of various celebrities. There was “Chispa,” for instance, the little Spanish bull-fighter who gave a benefit and “last final performance” in the plaza de toros each Sunday. The royal sport of Spain is, at best, a gloomy pastime in Spanish-America. Even when skilled toreadors from across the Atlantic are to be had, the bulls raised in the Andean highlands are so manso that the game degenerates into little more than public butchery. The killing of horses is forbidden in the bull-ring of Quito, both by law and because of the high price of those rare animals, and the toreador is not permitted to stir up a sluggish bull by exploding banderillos de fuego on his flanks. “Chispa,” however, who was just such a “spark” as his apodo suggested, would have enlivened the most dreary entertainment, though his companions were local amateurs, so clumsy that he was called upon to save the life of each a dozen times during each corrida. Each succeeding “despedida” had some new feature to draw recreation-hungry Quito within the circular mud walls. One Sunday the program announced the engagement of “Hombres de Yerba” and “Hombres Gordos” (“Men of Hay” and “Fat Men”), and the inventive Spaniard was all but forced to lock the gates against the tailend of the throng. One of his amateurs was bound round and round with green alfalfa and set in the center of the ring. The bull, however, either was not hungry or in no mood for jests, and tossed the helpless fellow scornfully from his path. The “Hombres Gordos” were made up with clown faces topped by silk hats, their bodies padded to enormous size with excelsior. Still the protection was not sufficient. One was thrown so savagely that the audience agreed he had been killed—until the evening paper announced he had merely broken a leg and several ribs. The fat man is no more beloved in Quito than elsewhere, and the merriment went on unabated. It is quiteÑo custom for the matador to brindar (dedicate the death of each bull) to some celebrity or person of means in the audience, tossing the favored one his cap to hold during the killing, and expecting it to be thrown back with a roll of bills in proportion to the skill of the coup de grace. Toward the end of the “last final performances” the supply of local “personages” grew so low that the eye of “Chispa,” roving around the circle, fell upon Hays; but even as he opened his mouth for the speech of dedication, the ex-corporal faded from public view.

Then there was Umberto Peyrounel, our first really and truly, flesh and blood “andarÍn.” Derived from the Spanish word andar (to walk), the term is used in the Andes to designate a foreigner who travels on foot, without any particular excuse for traveling at all; a peculiarly Latin type of tramp, loving to attract attention and making his living by so doing. We ourselves had often been styled “andarines” on the journey from BogotÁ, though this genuine article scornfully rated us “excursionistas.” The distinction seems to be, not whether a man “andars” on foot, but whether he makes his way without using his own money, if such he possesses.

We saw Umberto first at a Sunday night concert, where he was inconspicuously amusing himself by running races with several hundred newsboys and bootblacks around the plaza mayor. A stocky fellow, tall as Hays, of middle age, he was modestly dressed in a suit of sky-blue corduroy, leather leggings, and a velvet cap of the Dutch fisherman or Quartier Latin style. Across his chest hung a row of large medals; a flaring, wax-ended mustache all but touched his ears, and his luxurious black hair hung loose almost to his waist. When he called on us next morning his coiffure was done up in a simple maidenly knot at the back of his head. On closer examination the gleaming brass medals seemed to be glorified tobacco tags. He announced himself the son of Italian parents, born in the Argentine, of a sect corresponding to the Huguenots of France, known as the “martyrs of Piedmont.” Leaving home three years before, he had walked across his native land to Chile, thence to Quito, where he was preparing to push on to BogotÁ. To the people along the way—and even to us, until he caught the gleam in our eyes—he announced that two great dailies of Buenos Aires and New York had offered him a prize of $100,000 to make the journey on foot from the door of one to that of the other. On the road he was accompanied by a dog, wore silver-plated spurs as a sign of his rank as a caballero, and carried, in addition to a revolver and rifle, some forty pounds of baggage, most of which consisted of bulky ledgers filled with hand-written statements of his arrival and departure on foot, signed by every corregidor, alcalde, or native official of whatever species, by merchants, lawyers, and editors of every place, large or small, he had visited, each adorned with its official seal. This collecting of signatures was no mere whim; it was the customary excuse of his fellows for surreptitiously appealing to charity. At every hamlet he opened the ledgers—ostensibly to give the residents the pleasure of adding their names to the roll of honor—and at the psychological moment slipped into their hands a printed card bearing a subtle plea for assistance in winning his great “prize.” All genuine “andarines,” Umberto assured us, did the same, and he berated us soundly for not having adopted the custom.

“How can you prove to the public that you have made the journey on foot, if you do not have the testimonials of distinguished persons along the way?” he cried, scornfully.

“The public has its choice of believing it or jumping off the end of the dock,” Hays answered for both of us.

In plain English, Peyrounel was a beggar, though he would have been shocked beyond words to hear us say so. He called himself a “Champion of God,” a bitter enemy of the priesthood, and in each town of importance gave a lecture on his journey and, later on, “if the population showed enough intelligence,” a sermon. The religious fanatic so often proves, sooner or later, to be in a sexually neurotic state that we were not surprised when, several days later, Peyrounel burst out, apropos of nothing:

“Why do girls always become enamored of strange travelers? No sooner do I enter a town than several maidens fall desperately in love with me. I can’t be expected to satisfy them all, can I? One has one’s work to do.”

“Wooden-headed ass that I am!” growled Hays. “If I’d only thought to grow curls!”

“Between you and me, as men of the same profession,” went on the collector of signatures, “I don’t mind telling you that I ride now and then by train through a bad piece of country. What’s the use of walking hundreds of hot desert miles, when the people will never know the difference? For instance; here, under the seal of ——, it says that I walked all the four hundred miles from ——. Well, I did—on a steamer most of the way.”

In short the argentino’s mental equipment was somewhat out of repair. One could not exactly put one’s finger on the loose screw, but it could frequently be heard rattling. The following Sunday we attended his first “lecture.” On the dismal daytime stage of Quito’s hitherto lifeless Teatro Sucre sat Peyrounel, utterly alone but for the faithful dog at his feet, thrown into silhouette by an uncurtained window at the back, his sky-blue uniform looking more absurd than ever, his hair hanging in long, wet, careful curls about his broad shoulders. Quito has so few entertainments that it will endure almost anything particularly if no admission is charged; and some three hundred men were scattered about in the painfully upright seats, when the “andarÍn” rose. He read first some incomprehensible rodomontade on the power of the will, then drew forth a manuscript purporting to give an account of his journey, in reality strictly confined to a list of the towns he had visited, with the height of each above sea-level. The “lecture” was doubly unsuccessful, for when the speaker ended with an appeal for funds to continue his statistical journey, the gathering stampeded so effectively that all but a few had escaped when he reached the door, and the reward of his labors was a bare six dollars.

“Next Sunday,” he announced, when we met him in the plaza that evening, “I am going to give the public of Quito the benefit of my conclusions on suicide. Suicide, I shall prove, is always a prompting of the devil. Therefore it cannot be the prompting of God. Ergo, a man should not commit suicide, because he should never yield to the promptings of the devil.”

Truly a Solomon of pure reason had come to Quito. Yet somehow the authorities, always backward in such matters, failed to take advantage of this splendid opportunity to give the Teatro Sucre another free airing.

Never since those days in Quito have I heard the oft-repeated word “andarÍn,” than the picture of Peyrounel and his curls has not come to mind. However, he had undoubtedly covered long distances on foot, and we exchanged many a practical hint of roadway information. He planned to visit all the important cities of the United States, and to reach New York within three years. His letters of introduction already included many to American officials; he carried, for instance, one to the mayor of Seattle. Being an experienced traveler, all may have gone well with him south of the Rio Grande. But beyond it lay dangers he did not suspect; for some unromantic justice of the peace, unable to distinguish between an “andarÍn” and a common “vag,” between the honorable profession of gathering seals and signatures, and mere begging, may have the cruelty to reward him with the notorious “year and a day.”

On October tenth there was an eclipse of the sun, total at the Ecuador-Colombia boundary, and visible in all the southern hemisphere. In the days of the Scyri and Incas such a phenomenon was taken as a threat that the end of the world was at hand; a sign that an angry god was abandoning his erring people. On this occasion many of the less-educated classes remained in the streets all night, for an earthquake had been prophesied. The local observatory had assigned a scientist to “note the peculiar actions of the populace and the lower animals during the eclipse.” It came toward seven in the morning. Gradually the brilliant sun disappeared, until only the slightest thread, of crescent shape, remained visible; the world grew dark as at early dusk on a heavily clouded evening, then slowly lighted up again in all its equatorial magnificence. Observers reported that a few fowls returned to roost; the curs slinking about the plaza seemed for a time undecided whether to seek their nightly lairs. But the actions of the populace were confined to the incessant smoking of cigarettes and to making the most of an excuse to put off their day’s task as long as possible—neither of which was unusual enough to be worthy of note. The majority, unsupplied with smoked glasses, found this no handicap, for the reflected eclipse in the plaza pool served the same purpose. World scientists had been sent to many of the larger South American cities with elaborate photographic equipment, only to find their long journeys wasted because of clouds. They would have done better to have come to Quito, where two unscientific vagabonds caught excellent pictures of the phenomenon in mere kodak snapshots.

It was on the morning of November eighteenth, five months from the day we had sailed together from the Canal Zone, that Hays and I set out along the muddy, cobbled highway to the railway station, carrying in turn a bundle of the size of a suitcase. By 7:30 the former corporal of police had taken his wooden seat in the dingy little second-class car, and had stowed his belongings under it well out of sight of the collector; for extravagant as are its fares, the Guayaquil-Quito Railway allows a second-class passenger only fifteen pounds of baggage. At eight the tri-weekly train let pass unnoticed its scheduled hour of departure. Several stocky Americans of the type easily recognized as “railroad men,” and as many English-speaking negroes could be seen shouldering their way in and out of the motley throng. The engineers were leathery-skinned Americans; the conductors fat, burly Americans; the collectors gaunt, stringy, dense-looking young Englishmen, and the brakemen West Indian negroes who spoke a more fluent Spanish that their superiors, and were better “mixers” among the native passengers. After a time they decided to repair the last coach, and lay for some time under it, tinkering at a brake-shoe. Rumor had it that this was only a ruse; that the engineer assigned to the run had been arrested the evening before, and that the train could not leave until his trial was over.

Whatever the cause for delay, it ended at last, and with a great snorting and straining and blowing of steam the little old “Baldwin” began to drag its four wagones out of the station compound. First came a box-car, crowded inside and on top with gente del pueblo; then, behind the baggage and mail car, the densely-packed second-class; and finally the coach-de-luxe with a dozen passengers, most of whom would hasten to take their lawful place in the car ahead as soon as they could escape the eyes of their fellow-townsmen thronging the station platform. The Indian of Ecuador still commonly walks, a fact easily explained by a glance at the exorbitant rate-sheet. It was only by dint of much struggle that the railroad, reaching Quito four years before, had finally settled the point that even “prominent persons” shall pay fare; now it has taken the offensive, and collects cartage even on the bundles and fruit the passengers are accustomed to stack in the car about them. The engine panted asthmatically to surmount a two-foot rise, scores of Indians and cholos running alongside, screaming farewells to their outward-bound friends, some visibly weeping for the quiteÑo of the masses considers death itself little less dreadful than departure. Then at length the train swung round the sandbank cutting and, catching a down-grade, was off in earnest, and reluctantly I saw “SeÑor Lay-O-Ice” disappear from my South American adventures.

The attack of roaditis had seized him the day before. With no task to hold him in Quito, he had been for a time content to spend his days at his favorite occupation of sitting on a plaza bench. He had even paid his rent well in advance, that he might have an anchor to windward. But it had proved a rope of sand when the road lure came upon him, and he had feverishly tossed together his indispensable junk and turned his face toward other climes. From Guayaquil, “unless Yellow Jack or Bubonic beat him to it,” he planned to push on to Cajamarca and Lima, chiefly by sea, then to strike overland to Cuzco. Beyond South America lay various nebulous projects,—a year around the Mediterranean, a journey through Spain, or perhaps a return to the Zone to earn another “stake” with which to journey to the Far East, there to adopt the yellow robe and settle down to the tranquil life of studious inactivity he loved so well.

Thus life moved on, even in Quito. “Chispa” of the bullring had taken the same train, feigning a first-class wealth until out of sight of his quiteÑo admirers. Peyrounel, the “andarÍn,” too, was gone, dog, gun, hair, medals, spurs and ledgers, to carry back to BogotÁ the map that had piloted us southward. Only one lone gringo descended to the city in the folds of Pichincha, to renew the task that still forbade him to listen to the siren that beckoned him on over the encircling horizon.

To pass over in silence its uncleanliness would be to give a false picture of Quito. Only its altitude saves the city from sudden death. Its personal habits are indescribable; I do not use the adjective to avoid the labor of finding one less trite, but because no other could be more exact. If I described in detail one fourth its daily insults to the senses, no reputable publisher would print, and no self-respecting reader would read it. The city is surrounded by an iron ring of smells which the susceptible stranger, accustomed to the moderate decencies of life, can pass only in haste and trepidation. The condition of the best kitchen in Quito would arouse a vigorous protest from an American “hobo.” However foppish a quiteÑo family may be outwardly, anybody is considered fitted to the task of washing its dishes or waiting on its tables. Among all the tramps of the United States I have never seen one so filthy as the human creatures that hang around hotel dining-rooms, or, in the one or two higher-priced establishments, are at least to be found just behind the scenes, kicking about the earth floor the rolls which the waiter a moment later religiously lays before the guest with silver-plated pincers. Yet clients in frock-coats and outwardly immaculate garb are never known to raise a voice in protest. There is exactly one way to escape these conditions in Ecuador, and that is to keep out of the country. A modern Croesus would be forced to endure the same, for though he brought his own servants and even his food-supplies with him, the Ecuadorian would find some means of reducing him to an equality of condition, if only by opening the supplies in customs and running his unwashed hands through them.

Among our table companions were lawyers, university professors, newspaper editors, commonly with several rings on their fingers; yet rare was the man whose finger-nails were not in deepest mourning, or whose manners were not befitting a trough. On the street the passing of the women was usually marked by an all but overwhelming scent of the cheap and pungent perfumes to which all the “decente” class, male or female, is addicted, and though their faces were daubed a rosy alabaster, it was rare to see one with clean hands, or without a distinct dead-line showing at the neck. The city is gashed by several deep gullies with trickling streams at their bottoms, which serve as general dumping-grounds. Not even the carrion-crow mounts to these heights, and the city is denied the doubtful services of this tropical scavenger. Though the world hears little of it, the death-rate from typhoid alone in the capital rivals that of “Yellow Jacket” in Guayaquil; and no precautions whatever are taken against it. When he has noted these customs and worse, the visitor will be startled into shrieks of sardonic laughter when he runs across a large two-story building bearing an elaborately painted shield announcing it the “Oficina de Sanidad.”

Yet the quiteÑo is extremely jealous of any offer of other races to do for him that which he gives no evidence of being able to do for himself. Once out of Colombia, we had hoped for relief from the perpetual growling at Americans, chiefly in fiery and ill-reasoned newspaper editorials. Barely had we crossed the frontier, however, than we found Ecuador raging with a new grievance. The Government had recently invited the doctor in charge of the sanitation of Panama to inspect Guayaquil and bring his recommendations to the capital. A strict censorship on cable messages keeps the outside world largely in ignorance of the real conditions in the “Pearl of the Pacific.” Inside the country, however, the real state of affairs is more nearly common knowledge. One could pick almost at random from the local newspapers such items as:

Guayaquil, 22d. Yesterday forty cases of bubonic plague broke out in Public School No. 5. There are seven survivors.

The resident, too, soon learns the real motives that hamper the sanitation of that pest-hole. Once it is “cleaned up,” argue its short-sighted merchants, foreign competitors will flock in upon them. As to themselves, they are, with rare exceptions, immune to the two plagues for which the port is famous, having recovered from them at some earlier period of life. Those who have not recovered have no voice in the matter. There are even foreign residents who bend their energies to upholding this barrier to competition.

These interests now, abetted by unseen European elements fostering the discontent, and the eagerness of the opposing party to make political capital out of any cloth, whole or otherwise, had stirred the noisy little native papers into a furor, genuine or financed, against the Government. The people, in their turn, had worked themselves into the conviction that the invitation was only an opening wedge of the “Colossus of the North” to gain a hand in the rule of the country, which it is always the part of the opposition papers to paint as imminent. We had not been long in Quito when the attitude of the populace grew so serious that a joint meeting of both houses of congress was called to explain the government view of the transaction. The diplomatic corps was present in force, and as much of the public as could find standing-room after the two houses had been seated in the largest chamber available in the government palace. The diminutive old Minister of Foreign Affairs, who had lived abroad long enough to acquire a point of view, explained the exact truth of the situation as clearly as a disinterested foreigner might have done. But neither congress nor the populace would hear his reasoning. The latter hooted him vociferously, calling him “Yanqui!” and accusing him of being in the pay of the United States. The congressmen rose one after another to charge him with fostering a conspiracy to surrender Ecuador to the Yankees, with many references to the “beegee steekee,” and the meeting ended with the roar of a bull-necked senator:

“Undoubtedly, SeÑor, we want Guayaquil sanitated; but we want it sanitated by Latin Americans.”

The pesuÑa and other evidences of sanitary notions of the crowd that hemmed us in gave the speech a ludicrousness that none but an enraged partizan could have missed. But that night the little Minister of Foreign Affairs resigned, and when morning broke he had disappeared.

For all the handicap of the complete absence of factories and street-cars, Quito might easily lay claim to the world’s championship in noise. The din from its church-towers alone would bring it one of the first prizes. It is pleasant to sit out on a sunny hillside listening to the music of ringing church-bells as it is borne by on the Sunday morning breeze; but in Quito they are neither bells nor are they rung. In tone they suggest suspended masses of scrap-iron, and there is not a bell-rope, as we understand the word, in the length and breadth of the Andes. Barely has midnight passed, when Indians, hired for the nefarious purpose, and mobs of street urchins eager for the opportunity, climb into the church-towers and, catching the enormous clappers by a rope-end, beat and pound as if each was vying with the others in an attempt to reproduce the primeval chaos of sound, ceasing only when they drop from exhaustion. No corner of the city is free from the metallic uproar. Santa Catalina tower was a bare hundred yards above my pillow, and I know scarcely a block of the town over which does not rise at least one such source of torture, hung with at least half a dozen bells—to use the word loosely—of varying sizes and degrees of discordance. Once awakened, the city is never permitted to fall asleep again. By the time it has begun to doze off once more, the ringers have recovered, and, taking up their joyful task with renewed vigor, repeat the performance at five-minute intervals until sunrise, and often far into the day.

The street by which one leaves Quito on the tramp to the south. In the background the church and monastery of Santo Domingo