“It is an afternoon of April, 1534. Twilight sheds its undivided gleam above the plains. The sun taking off its crown of topazes is about to retire on the bed of foam to which the ocean entices it. Creation is at this instant a lyre letting fall soft sounds. The desirous breeze that passes giving a kiss to the jasmine, the petal that falls jostled by the wings of the painted humming-bird, the _turpial_ that sings a song of agony in the aspen foliage, the sun that sets, firing the horizon ... all is beautiful. The last hours of the afternoon and all things elevate the created toward the Creator. “To hear in the distance the soft murmur of the brook slipping along, to feel that our temples are brushed by the zephyr filled with the perfume which is exhaled by the flower of the lemon-tree and the rushy ground, and in the midst of this concert of nature” ... such is the imagery of the literature of Peru. [Illustration: A GLIMPSE OF OLD-FASHIONED LIMA.] IV A woman in lilac called Dolores, a pretty woman with a vapid face, was absent-mindedly turning a green glass globe between her fingers and selling guavas. Young soldiers whose swords trailed along the pavement were eating the guavas. We got out of the carriage and rattled at a door until a keeper with jangling keys came to open it. The walls were spiked and covered with broken glass. The door banged together behind us. A thin, delicately featured man in a black silk cap and stock came forward in welcome. “The composer of _Ollanta_, the national opera,” some one introduced. He led us toward a bare room scattered with manuscript music as fine as copper-plate. I looked at the iron bars across the windows. Over the piano hung three dusty laurel wreaths, the people’s tribute to a genius they could not understand. After a three weeks’ presentation by an uncomprehending Italian troupe, Lima demanded _Mignon_, and the manuscript opera was returned to the upper, right-hand drawer from which its composer now drew it. “I am transcribing the melodies of the Indians of the highlands, some of them survivals of Inca days,” he explained. He played the weird, syncopated music of the Andes, bringing the indefinable “shiver of unknown rhythm,” the wheedling love-songs and the sad _yaravís_ which suggested those deep valleys lost among the mountain-tops. “You know the _yaraví_ of the Indians? It is a peculiar music, a melancholy idyl reflecting the somber Indian character--a music of extremes, for no other is so dismal and so sweet. It wails in a minor key through strange Quichua words, the language of the Indians. “Many of these melodies I have used unchanged. Nothing so speaks to the spirit as they.... A secret music like that of falling water--one cannot hear it without thinking of the riddle of the world. It has a full, pent-up significance, as when a bird puts all the fervor of its song into pianissimo. It moves like the music of birds, and like it does not admit of criticism.”