The journey is not an unpleasant one. The scenery is wild and picturesque. The roads are usually good, except in the dry season, when they become very dusty, and after heavy rains, when the mud is deep. But under the tropic sun and in the dry air moisture evaporates rapidly, and in six hours after a rainfall the roads are hard and good. The uncertainty as to whether his trunks will arrive in time makes the inexperienced traveller nervous. The Costa-Rican cartmen are the most irresponsible and indifferent beings on earth. They travel in long caravans or processions, often with two or three hundred teams in a line. When one chooses to stop, or meets with an accident, all the rest wait for him if it wastes a week. None will start until each of his companions is ready, and sometimes the road is blocked for miles, awaiting the repair of some damage. The oxen are large white patient beasts, and are yoked by the horns, and not by the neck, as in modern style, lashings of raw cowhide being used to make them fast. They wear the yokes continually. The union is as permanent as matrimony in a land where divorce laws are unknown. The cartmen are as courteous as they are indifferent. They always lift their hats to a _caballero_ as he passes them, and say, “May the Virgin guard you on your journey!” Thousands of dollars in gold are often intrusted to them, and never was a penny lost. A banker of San José told me that he usually received thirty thousand dollars in coin each week during coffee season by these ox-carts, and considered it safer than if he carried it himself, although the caravan stands in the open air by the roadside every night. Highway robbery is unknown, and the cartmen, with their wages of thirty cents a day, would not know what use to make of the money if they should steal it. Nevertheless they always feel at liberty to rob the traveller of the straps on his trunks, and no piece of baggage ever arrives at its destination so protected unless the strap is securely nailed, and then it is usually cut to pieces by the cartmen as revenge for being deprived of what they consider their perquisite. At sunset the oxen are released from their burdens at the nearest _tambo_, or resting-place, upon the way, and are kept overnight in sheds provided for them. At these places are drinking and gambling booths, with usually a number of dissolute women to tempt and entertain the cartmen. The evenings are spent in carousal, in dancing, and singing the peculiar native songs to the accompaniment of the “marimba,” the national instrument, which is, I believe, found in no other land.