 the coast. The O.S.N. Company found much
occupation for its fleet. Costaguana had no navy, and, apart from a few
coastguard cutters, there were no national ships except a couple of old merchant
steamers used as transports.
    Captain Mitchell, feeling more and more in the thick of history, found time
for an hour or so during an afternoon in the drawing-room of the Casa Gould,
where, with a strange ignorance of the real forces at work around him, he
professed himself delighted to get away from the strain of affairs. He did not
know what he would have done without his invaluable Nostromo, he declared. Those
confounded Costaguana politics gave him more work - he confided to Mrs. Gould -
than he had bargained for.
    Don José Avellanos had displayed in the service of the endangered Ribiera
Government an organizing activity and an eloquence of which the echoes reached
even Europe. For, after the new loan to the Ribiera Government, Europe had
become interested in Costaguana. The Sala of the Provincial Assembly (in the
Municipal Buildings of Sulaco), with its portraits of the Liberators on the
walls and an old flag of Cortez preserved in a glass case above the President's
chair, had heard all these speeches - the early one containing the impassioned
declaration »Militarism is the enemy,« the famous one of the trembling balance
delivered on the occasion of the vote for the raising of a second Sulaco
regiment in the defence of the reforming Government; and when the provinces
again displayed their old flags (proscribed in Guzman Bento's time) there was
another of those great orations, when Don José greeted these old emblems of the
war of Independence, brought out again in the name of new Ideals. The old idea
of Federalism had disappeared. For his part he did not wish to revive old
political doctrines. They were perishable. They died. But the doctrine of
political rectitude was immortal. The second Sulaco regiment, to whom he was
presenting this flag, was going to show its valour in a contest for order,
peace, progress; for the establishment of national self-respect without which -
he declared with energy - »we are a reproach and a byword amongst the powers of
the world.«
    Don José Avellanos loved his country. He had served it lavishly with his
fortune during his diplomatic career, and the later story of his captivity and
barbarous ill-usage under Guzman Bento was well known to his listeners. It was a
wonder that he had not been a victim of the ferocious and summary executions
which marked the course of that tyranny; for
