Excellent beef and pork are to be obtained, at cheap rates, in all the principal towns, and poultry is abundant. A pair of chickens costs from a _quartillo_ to a _medio_,—i. e. from three to six cents. Next to the tortillas and frijoles, however, the chief articles of consumption are rice, plantains, and a kind of cheese, which is supplied in great quantities from the “haciendas de las vacas,” or cattle estates. The plantains are cooked in many ways,—boiled, fried, and roasted,—and are singly capable of sustaining life. And when I add that, in many parts of the state, they may be had for the asking, and that everywhere six cents worth will sustain a small family for a week, it will be understood that the incentives to labor cannot be very strong, and that the poorest wretch need not go hungry. The markets of Leon display the greatest profusion of fruits and vegetables, of which it would be almost impossible to give a complete list. Water and musk melons, papayas, pine apples, oranges, mamays, nisperos, pomegranates, marañons, jocotes, yucas, plantains, bananas, beans, maize, and occasionally small potatoes but little larger than bullets, brought in bales from the highlands of Costa Rica and Honduras, and sold by the pound. And as the smallest coin in the country is a _quartillo_, or three cents, which would purchase more of almost any of these articles than most families would require at one time, change is made in the aboriginal coin of the country, namely _cacao nuts_, of which four are about equivalent in value to one cent of our currency.