Our journey was from New Orleans, in one of the splendid snow-white steamers of the fruit company. This ship, going by Belize in British Honduras, took us to Limon on the Caribbean side of Costa Rica, a place of banana plantations and Jamaica-negro labor. From Limon we took a mountain-climbing, narrow-gauge railroad, to the high and healthful capital, San Jose. We passed the ruins of the city of Cartago, with its earthquake tumbled churches and wrecked lower buildings, all covered with heavy roofs of red tiles. Don Anastasio Alfaro, government scientist, showed us seismographs and maps, and we called on President Jimenez, who owned a dairy farm on the high slopes of Irazu Volcano directly above Cartago. I arranged with the President to have the government make an official inquiry all over the Republic, suggesting a study of ten grades of earthquake damage, adapted to Central American habits. These grades, from mere alarm up to wrecked churches, were to apply to what had happened in each place. According to the answers, we would make for each place a numerical value of intensity and plot these on the map. We visited the wreckage of Cartago, where the quake had come like the crack of a whip on May 4, 1910, just at the supper hour. An American railway conductor and his family were seated at table and with the first jarrings, they all pitched forward under the dining room table. When the low adobe house fell on top of them, the table saved their lives. A pathetic object was the hollow square of the Carnegie Palace, designed by a Costa Rican architect to promote Central American peace. It was improperly braced, and everything came down, including the ornate stone wall around the grounds; and a cracked gate post held a melancholy buzzard in the hideous ruin. This and several of the big churches, cracked and disrupted, gave Spofford food for his architectural notes. The President’s farm on Irazu was a lovely place of green glades, fat cattle, and attractive Spanish dairymaids, at an altitude of more than 9,000 feet. The crater of Irazu at 10,300 feet was a tumbled depression on the top of the mountain with a steaming solfatara on one side, and a lot of circular holes inside, within a rim more or less circular.