Our billet assigned was such a hut, hung round with hollow logs used as beehives; in dismounting we upset one, but the insects were familiar with disasters of the sort, and they took it kindly. We asked about “Carib Stones,” as usual—all antiquities are called Carib Stones in Nicaragua—and the guide led us into another compound, where a very old man crouched beside an enormous fire, with three or four Indians about him. When our inquiries were explained, with difficulty, the veteran brightened and began talking like a machine. Some feathers of the quetzal bird lay beside him; these he snatched up, waved, and shook to emphasise his statements. We could understand very little of the patois, more than half Indian; but the naked old man’s shadow played grotesquely on the lattice wall behind, the brandished plumes flashed emerald and sapphire, the elders sat round like wrinkled effigies in bronze, their small eyes fixed upon us with never a wink. The ancient hero did not tell much—he spoke of the golden temple which, as everybody knows, is hid somewhere in the neighboring woods; but gave no precise information. Afterwards we learned that this was a lineal descendant of the old caciques of Dirioma, who gave four thousand axes of gold—or whatever the number may have been—to Gil Gonzalez de Avila. Though he worked as a slave before the emancipation, the Indians revere and obey him to such degree that a Secretary of State thought worth while to ask of us what his remarks had been. Many odd quarters we knew on the West Coast, where men and circumstances have a character all their own. Quisa recurs to my mind just now; I could not tell why, for we saw places as strange under more exciting conditions. This is the first town, or was, within the Ashanti realm proper. It looked almost civilized to us, marching from the coast—for refinement is comparative—and decidedly picturesque. Quisa might be called a town, its ways streets, its dwellings cottages of unusual form. A row of fine shade-trees in the middle of the chief thoroughfare had earthen benches at their feet, where the elders sat for council and gossip. The king’s house stood at the intersection of the main streets. It had not the alcove or box in the outer wall, so conspicuous in the architecture of Coomassie, but the façade, of polished stucco, was broken by niches, and moulded arabesques, two inches in relief, covered it all over. What they represented or signified we could not make out with confidence, so thoroughly had the style been “conventionalized” by generations of artists; but in the original idea they were human figures probably, engaged in war and ceremonies of state. The wall was colored in Venetian red, with a pleasing gloss upon it, and it stretched twenty yards or so on either side the doorway. This was a Moorish arch, of wood, the same in type as those we are familiar with at Sydenham, and gaily painted. Inside and out all was clean and perfect.