chickens with their wings turned inside out and their feathers put on the wrong way. We could throw stones at the dogs without attracting notice; but I found the people evidently did not like to have the pigs insulted. Our señora was a curious specimen, all skin and bones, clad in a scant dress, a large straw hat, and apparently nothing else, and smoking an ever-burning cigar. At night she put us on a shelf of slim bambus that would not bear our weight standing, though they made a fairly comfortable bed. We shared this loft with corn and poultry; and looking down into the common room beneath us, we saw by the light of a bowl of oil strange domestic scenes. Women were swinging in hammocks and smoking cigars, and children lying naked on the bare earth floor; and it was pleasant to see such at-one-ness and the utter absence of anything like bashfulness. Our calendar alone informed us that the next day was Christmas, and we spent it in waiting for our mozos and bestias, who arrived about three o’clock. We sat on the sheet-iron pipes, fifteen inches in diameter, which were resting here on their way to the Friedmann mines, farther south. They kept us out of the mud, and were the only comfortable seats in the town. On the mango and orange trees we found a pretty little yellow orchid (_Oncidium_?). In the houses we saw tanning done, without a vat, by making a bag of the hide and filling it with the bark decoction, which slowly percolated through and was replaced. The remains of an English steam-launch were scattered about, sheets of copper from her bottom serving as clapboards to part of the house where we lodged. At night the men of the place were all drunk and very noisy. The fires were kept burning late, and cast weird gleams through the open slat walls into the darkness.