the outward character of the crowds on feast days on the plaza before
the open portal of the cathedral, by the number of white ponchos with a
green stripe affected as holiday wear by the San Tome miners. They had
also adopted white hats with green cord and braid--articles of good
quality, which could be obtained in the storehouse of the administration
for very little money. A peaceable Cholo wearing these colours (unusual
in Costaguana) was somehow very seldom beaten to within an inch of his
life on a charge of disrespect to the town police; neither ran he much
risk of being suddenly lassoed on the road by a recruiting party of
lanceros--a method of voluntary enlistment looked upon as almost legal
in the Republic. Whole villages were known to have volunteered for the
army in that way; but, as Don Pepe would say with a hopeless shrug to
Mrs. Gould, "What would you! Poor people! Pobrecitos! Pobrecitos! But
the State must have its soldiers."

Thus professionally spoke Don Pepe, the fighter, with pendent
moustaches, a nut-brown, lean face, and a clean run of a cast-iron jaw,
suggesting the type of a cattle-herd horseman from the great Llanos of
the South. "If you will listen to an old officer of Paez, senores," was
the exordium of all his speeches in the Aristocratic Club of Sulaco,
where he was admitted on account of his past services to the extinct
cause of Federation. The club, dating from the days of the proclamation
of Costaguana's independence, boasted many names of liberators amongst
its first founders. Suppressed arbitrarily innumerable times by
various Governments, with memories of proscriptions and of at least one
wholesale massacre of its members, sadly assembled for a banquet by the
order of a zealous military commandante (their bodies were afterwards
stripped naked and flung into the plaza out of the windows by the
lowest scum of the populace), it was again flourishing, at that period,
peacefully. It extended to strangers the large hospitality of the cool,