We might wander long through the beautiful scenery of Salvador, enjoying the grand and imposing aspect of its volcanoes, the beauty of its valleys and streams, for this part of Central America is famed, or rather should be famed, for the beauty of the landscape. Quaint towns and curious products, the quiet and in some respects pleasant life of its folk, the budding industries, and a certain promise for the future leave a pleasant impression upon the mind of the traveller in this little State facing the broad Pacific. Of the Republic of Nicaragua, which we may approach either from the Atlantic or the Pacific, and which is the largest of this group of States, many dismal descriptions have been given. It is described as economically and in civic conditions the most backward. Yet some of its towns are fine places. Leon was described as a splendid city by travellers in 1665, and about that period the very active buccaneer Dampier gathered rich booty from it. Granada, founded by Cordova in 1523, was also one of the richest cities in Central America, and it, too, gave up its toll of booty to the corsairs. The Cathedral of Leon is one of the most noteworthy, massive and ornate of the great stone temples with which the Spaniards endowed the New World, typical of the colonial architecture which redeems these centres of life from the prosaic vulgarity of some other lands. [Illustration: THE CITY OF GUATEMALA. Vol. I. To face p. 80.] We may visit these towns from the line of railway which runs from Corinto, the chief seaport on the Pacific coast. The capital of the Republic, the city of Managua, is of less interesting character, and was, in a measure, raised to that position in order to put an end to the rivalry between Leon and Granada, both of which claimed metropolitan predominance. It is situated upon the great lake of Nicaragua, the most prominent topographical feature of this part of Central America, and which, it will be recollected, was at one time destined to form part of the waterway of a proposed trans-isthmian canal in place of that of Panama. This great lake valley and its adjacent highlands form the most plentifully inhabited part of Nicaragua, as the Spanish colonial development seized first upon its more fertile soil, watered by the lake and streams. This civilization entered the country from the Pacific side, from which we remark the grim and distant ramparts of the Central American Cordillera, with its volcanoes intervening between the western versant and littoral, and the low, monotonous and swampy region of the east, and the Mosquito Coast bordering upon the Atlantic. The Pacific coast here is bold and rocky, with a headland enclosing the Bay of Fonseca in Nicaraguan territory. Through the Cordillera flows the San Juan River, draining this low eastern slope, and here lay the route of the projected Nicaraguan Canal, whose abandonment caused bitter disappointment to the people of the Republic.