of aristocracy, the Sulaco Oligarchs (this was the phraseology of Guzman
Bento's time; now they were called Blancos, and had given up the federal
idea), which meant the families of pure Spanish descent, considered
Charles as one of themselves. With such a family record, no one could
be more of a Costaguanero than Don Carlos Gould; but his aspect was
so characteristic that in the talk of common people he was just the
Inglez--the Englishman of Sulaco. He looked more English than a casual
tourist, a sort of heretic pilgrim, however, quite unknown in Sulaco.
He looked more English than the last arrived batch of young railway
engineers, than anybody out of the hunting-field pictures in the numbers
of Punch reaching his wife's drawing-room two months or so after date.
It astonished you to hear him talk Spanish (Castillan, as the natives
say) or the Indian dialect of the country-people so naturally. His
accent had never been English; but there was something so indelible
in all these ancestral Goulds--liberators, explorers, coffee
planters, merchants, revolutionists--of Costaguana, that he, the only
representative of the third generation in a continent possessing its
own style of horsemanship, went on looking thoroughly English even
on horseback. This is not said of him in the mocking spirit of the
Llaneros--men of the great plains--who think that no one in the world
knows how to sit a horse but themselves. Charles Gould, to use the
suitably lofty phrase, rode like a centaur. Riding for him was not a
special form of exercise; it was a natural faculty, as walking straight
is to all men sound of mind and limb; but, all the same, when cantering
beside the rutty ox-cart track to the mine he looked in his English
clothes and with his imported saddlery as though he had come this moment
to Costaguana at his easy swift pasotrote, straight out of some green
meadow at the other side of the world.

His way would lie along the old Spanish road--the Camino Real of popular