This is one of the occasions when rigorous Spanish etiquette is somewhat relaxed and the unmarried women enjoy a fleeting glimpse of social freedom. So the crowd, constantly swelling, until progress is almost impossible, moves in a circle back and forth along the length of the plaza. Mingling with it are scores of police, in their bright uniforms, who seem to have no business there except to accentuate the crush, and hundreds of civilians in their best dress. And so it goes, until the concert ends. The band, preceded by an escort of cavalry, marches away to a wonderfully quick quickstep, the lights fade and slowly the crowd disperses through the shadowy streets. Not all San Juan, however, is to be seen in the grand plaza. Only fashionable and official life centralizes there. In other sections of the city the evenings pass differently. Take a stroll from the brilliantly lighted plaza into the eastern part of the town, near the barracks. There the whole lower strata will be found in the narrow, badly lighted streets, or in the plaza Cristobal Colon and the smaller breathing places of the densely populated city. Here hand organs and dirty wandering minstrels, who perform semi-barbaric music upon cracked guitars and raspy mandolins, accompanied by the "guero"--a native instrument made of a gourd--furnish the music. Venders of _dulce_ squat beside their trays of sweetmeat, dolorously crying their wares. Non-commissioned officers and privates mingle with the people and chat with the women. Everybody smokes cigarettes, even children hardly able to toddle. The shops and meaner _cafés_ are open and crowded. Further no one can wander through streets more narrow and darker than alleys to where the massive gray battlements of the ancient city walls lift their sombre, jagged towers to greet the moon. Inquisitive sentinels, Mauser rifle in hand, walk here to turn intruders back, but by exercising discretion glimpses may be obtained of tiny balconies ensconced in nooks and crannies high up in the wall and overlooking the sea and the twinkling city. Perhaps a peep may be had into the odd habitations within, with dusky senoritas gazing out through a curtain of flowers and vines. This is a different San Juan from that which promenades in the plaza: but not less interesting. All this Roderic Owen saw, nor was it the first time he had wandered through the streets and byways of the strange old city. How vividly these scenes brought back to his mind the days and nights of the past, when he had lived in a glow of love's young dream--still, why need he sigh--the experience through which he had passed, bitter though it had been, must have taught him a lesson, and since Love had again taken up an abode in his heart, he could profit by it to forever debar the little demon Jealousy from entering this holiest of holies. He wandered over the whole city.