To-day, when we leave our comfortable steamer and follow those same paths, we find little alteration, in many respects, after the lapse of four centuries. We must journey in the saddle over the roughest and often most dangerous of mountain trails. At night it may be that an indifferent _fonda_, or inn, in the poor Indian villages on the road will afford some hospitality, but this will be of the meanest description. Railways are few and far between along this immense and little-travelled seaboard; food is scarce and life primitive. But the stamp of Spain is over all, and there is an atmosphere--attenuated it may be--of the times of Don Quijote de la Mancha in its social regimen. We cannot withhold a tribute to Spain, in remarking how she stamped, for all time, her own characteristic culture throughout thousands of miles, east, north and south, of tropic seaboard and rugged Cordillera, upon this great continent. But "Spanish gentlemen should not soil their hands in trade" ran a decree of the old "Laws of the Indies," and the Spaniards, except for their exploitation of the rich gold, silver and quicksilver mines (at a terrible toll of Indian lives), did not reap much commercial profit from their possessions. This great mineral wealth was poured for centuries into the needy coffers of Spain--poured as into a sieve, for it was largely squandered. Under the viceroys the mines were worked with feverish activity. In one instance an urgent mandate for increased production so worked upon the official in charge of one of the huge mines, those of Huancavelica, in yonder mountains--a veritable labyrinth of underground galleries and chambers, among which was a chapel, deep below the surface, with candles ever burning before its shrines--that he ordered the supporting columns of ore to be taken out, with a result that the mine fell in, entombing five hundred miners, whose bones remain in the ruin to this day, it is said. As for commerce, the British are the great Phoenicians on this coast; transporting cargo hither and bearing it hence. The German activity became marked before the war, but the _Kosmos_ line of steamers stopped, and the Teutonic bagsman ceased his assiduous traverse of the interior villages with his wares.