boundary pillars of their estates. In all these households she
could hear stories of political outrage; friends, relatives, ruined,
imprisoned, killed in the battles of senseless civil wars, barbarously
executed in ferocious proscriptions, as though the government of the
country had been a struggle of lust between bands of absurd devils let
loose upon the land with sabres and uniforms and grandiloquent phrases.
And on all the lips she found a weary desire for peace, the dread of
officialdom with its nightmarish parody of administration without law,
without security, and without justice.

She bore a whole two months of wandering very well; she had that power
of resistance to fatigue which one discovers here and there in some
quite frail-looking women with surprise--like a state of possession by
a remarkably stubborn spirit. Don Pepe--the old Costaguana major--after
much display of solicitude for the delicate lady, had ended by
conferring upon her the name of the "Never-tired Senora." Mrs. Gould
was indeed becoming a Costaguanera. Having acquired in Southern Europe a
knowledge of true peasantry, she was able to appreciate the great worth
of the people. She saw the man under the silent, sad-eyed beast of
burden. She saw them on the road carrying loads, lonely figures upon
the plain, toiling under great straw hats, with their white clothing
flapping about their limbs in the wind; she remembered the villages by
some group of Indian women at the fountain impressed upon her memory,
by the face of some young Indian girl with a melancholy and sensual
profile, raising an earthenware vessel of cool water at the door of a
dark hut with a wooden porch cumbered with great brown jars. The solid
wooden wheels of an ox-cart, halted with its shafts in the dust, showed
the strokes of the axe; and a party of charcoal carriers, with each
man's load resting above his head on the top of the low mud wall, slept
stretched in a row within the strip of shade.