The city has about thirty thousand inhabitants--nearly one-seventh of the entire population of the republic--and seems quaint and queer to the North American traveller because of its unlikeness to anything he has seen at home. The climate is a perpetual spring. The flowers are perennial; the foliage fades and falls in autumn, dying from exhaustion, but never from frost. The days are always warm and delightful, and the nights cool and favorable to sweet rest. Winter is not so agreeable as summer, for when it is not raining the winds blow dust in your eyes, and you miss the foliage and fruits. There is not such a thing as an overcoat in the place--the storekeepers do not sell them--and the natives never heard of stoves. One can look over the roofs of the town from the tower of the cathedral and not see a chimney anywhere. The mercury seldom goes above eighty, and never below sixty, Fahrenheit. The thick walls of the houses make an even temperature within, scarcely varying five degrees from one year to another, and it never rains long enough for the dampness to penetrate them. There is no architectural taste displayed, and a never-ending sameness marks the streets. It is only in the country that picturesque dwellings are found, and usually Nature, not man, has made them so. The shops differ from the residences only in having wider doors and larger rooms, while the warehouses are usually abandoned monasteries or discarded dwellings. The merchants are mostly foreigners--Frenchmen or Germans; the professional men and laborers are natives. The people are more peaceful and industrious than in the other Central American States, and have the reputation for greater honesty, but less ingenuity, than their neighbors. They take no interest in politics, seldom vote, and do not seem to care who governs them. There has not been a revolution in Costa Rica since 1872, and that grew out of the rivalry of two English banking houses in securing a government loan. The prisons are empty; the doors of the houses are seldom locked; the people are temperate and amiable, and live at peace with one another. The national vice is indolence--_mañana_ (pronounced manyannah), a word that is spoken oftener than any other in the language, and means “some other time.” It is a proverb that the Costa-Rican is “always lying under the mañana-tree,” and that is why the people are poor and the nation bankrupt. The resources of the country, agricultural, mineral, pastoral, and timber, are immense, but have not even been explored. Ninety per cent. of the natives have never been outside the little valley in which they were born; while the Government has done little to invite immigration and encourage development. There are two railroads, both unfinished, and the money that was borrowed to build them was wasted in the most ludicrous way.