. The journey from London to Sta. Marta
in mail boats and the special carriages of the Sta. Marta coast-line (the only
railway so far) had been tolerable - even pleasant - quite tolerable. But the
trip over the mountains to Sulaco was another sort of experience, in an old
diligencia over impassable roads skirting awful precipices.
    »We have been upset twice in one day on the brink of very deep ravines,« he
was telling Mrs. Gould in an undertone. »And when we arrived here at last I
don't know what we should have done without your hospitality. What an
out-of-the-way place Sulaco is! - and for a harbour, too! Astonishing!«
    »Ah, but we are very proud of it. It used to be historically important. The
highest ecclesiastical court, for two viceroyalties, sat here in the olden
time,« she instructed him with animation.
    »I am impressed. I didn't mean to be disparaging. You seem very patriotic.«
    »The place is lovable, if only by its situation. Perhaps you don't know what
an old resident I am.«
    »How old, I wonder,« he murmured, looking at her with a slight smile. Mrs.
Gould's appearance was made youthful by the mobile intelligence of her face. »We
can't give you your ecclesiastical court back again; but you shall have more
steamers, a railway, a telegraph-cable - a future in the great world which is
worth infinitely more than any amount of ecclesiastical past. You shall be
brought in touch with something greater than two viceroyalties. But I had no
notion that a place on a sea-coast could remain so isolated from the world. If
it had been a thousand miles inland now - most remarkable! Has anything ever
happened here for a hundred years before to-day?«
    While he talked in a slow, humorous tone, she kept her little smile.
Agreeing ironically, she assured him that certainly not - nothing ever happened
in Sulaco. Even the revolutions, of which there had been two in her time, had
respected the repose of the place. Their course ran in more populous southern
parts of the Republic, and the great valley of Sta. Marta, which was like one
great battlefield of the parties, with the possession of the capital for a prize
and an outlet to another ocean. They were more advanced over there. Here in
Sulaco they heard only the echoes of these great questions, and, of course,
their official world
