of Sulaco, so
characteristic with its stuccoed houses and barred windows, with the great
yellowy-white walls of abandoned convents behind the rows of sombre green
cypresses, that fact - very modern in its spirit - the San Tomé mine had already
thrown its subtle influence. It had altered, too, 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 Tomé 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
Pépé 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 Pépé, 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, señores,« 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, big rooms of its historic quarters in the front part of
a house, once the residence of a high official of the Holy Office. The two
wings, shut up, crumbled behind the nailed doors, and what may be described as a
grove of young orange