The spiritual atmosphere of Bolanyo was like the charm of an old book that we prize only for the almost secret art of its expression, an art too ethereal to be caught and inspected. Sometimes it was drowsy, with all the dreamy laziness of a hamlet in the south of Spain, but there were days when it seemed to rebel against its own ease and unconcern, when a sense of Americanism asserted itself to demand a share in the bustling affairs of noisy commerce. Court day was a time of special activity. It was then that the local market felt a stimulating thrill. My window looked out upon the public square, a macadamized space, white and dazzling in the sun. Sometimes the scene was busy and interesting in variety; wagons loaded with hay still fragrant of the meadow; a brisk horse trotted up and down in front of an auctioneer; negroes with live chickens tied in bunches; a drunken man making a speech on the wretched condition of the country; a "fakir" on the corner selling a soap that would remove a stain from even a tarnished reputation. Life along the levee was ever interesting to me, for it was there that I could study the slowly vanishing type of boatmen, once so distinctive as to threaten the coming of a new and haughty aristocracy. Singing the song of long ago, with their eyes fixed upon the river, the old negroes stumbled over the railway track that a new progress had thrown across their domain. Great red warehouses were falling into decay, and rank weeds were growing in the bow of a half-submerged steamer that years ago had won a great race on the river. Everywhere lay the rotting ends and broken ravelings of the past, but nowhere, not even in the oddest corner, could there be found the thread of a hope for the future. The business interests of the town had grown away from the river, leaving it to melancholy poetry and to death. And here I loitered, day after day, in a vague contentment extracted from a distress more vague. To a thoughtful mind there is more of interest in decay than in progress; the "Decline and Fall" is a greater book than could have been written on the "Origin and Rise." I could find no one to tell me much of the history of Bolanyo; no one appeared to take an interest in that part of its existence which lay behind the halcyon and now almost holy day of the steamboat. I knew that, in a corrupted form, it retained the name given originally to the Spanish fortification. But that was enough to know, for the exact dates of the historian might have made it, in comparison with places of real antiquity, a toadstool of yesterday. I saw the Senator nearly every day, in the office or on the street. Election was not far away, and he had begun to mingle more freely with the people; and though his manner was as cordial and as solicitous as on the day when driving with me he had saluted everyone whom he met in the road, he was far from being familiar, and no one, except his most intimate friends, presumed to call him Giles.