I have thus far neglected to give due credit to the tropical flea, to whose industry, enterprise, and assiduous solicitude all travellers in Spanish-America are indebted for a great deal of diversion. At first his attentions are somewhat annoying, and there is a general disposition to conceal acquaintance with him; but when every man, woman, and child in a company is constantly scratching, it becomes difficult to ignore conditions that are common and conspicuous, and everybody admits, first with blushes and then with brazen shamelessness, that he’s got ’em. There is no use of trying to conceal the fact. They are as common and as plenty as flies in the basement kitchen of a city boarding-house, and the Venezuela coat-of-arms would more truly represent the condition of the country if it showed a man vainly trying to scratch in seven places at once instead of a wild horse dashing over the pampas. They are little black insects, which will get into your clothing in the most unaccountable manner. You find them in your shoes and under your shirt-collar; you wake up in the night and think you have somehow wandered into a plantation of nettles; or, when you become a little more accustomed to it, dream regularly that you are lying on the prickly side of a cactus. To rub the flesh with brandy does some good, but the better way is to grin and bear it. The pests are bad enough in Mexico; they are worse in the West Indies; but in Venezuela--the less said the better. [Illustration: IN THE SUBURBS OF LA GUAYRA.] Between La Guayra and Caracas rises a mountain called La Silla (The Saddle), from the shape of its summit, eight thousand six hundred feet above the sea, and there are three roads between the two cities. The shortest is a trail nine miles long, through a ravine, which was used by the Indians at the time of the discovery by Columbus, but it is impassable for quadrupeds, and dangerous for any but expert and experienced mountaineers. Then there is an old wagon-road, steep and rough, for twenty-two miles, which was constructed by the Spaniards after the Conquest. The third is a tramway, narrow gauge, built along shelves which have been excavated in the side of the mountains by English engineers and English capital. The train goes slowly, and there is almost always a track-walker with a spade upon his shoulder in sight. It would not do to run up or down the grades in the night, or at a speed greater than ten miles an hour; hence it requires two hours and a half to make the journey, than which there is no more interesting in the world. The grade averages one hundred and ninety-seven feet to the mile, the highest altitude passed being four thousand six hundred feet; and one does not know which to admire the most--the difficulties nature has placed in the way of man, or the manner in which man has overcome them.