Off the coast of Puerto Cabello lies the island of Curaçoa, the quaintest, most novel, and altogether most interesting place on the Spanish Main. It is a fragment of Amsterdam, set upon a coral rock in the middle of the sea. It has always been a colony of Holland, with all the picturesque quaintness, stupidity, and wooden-shoe-oddity of the fatherland. Leaving the tropic scenes of Spanish America at bedtime and waking up in Holland in the morning makes you feel like one of Plato’s troglodytes, who were raised in a cavern and then suddenly dropped into the world. You cannot quite allay the feeling that something has been done to you; the appearance of things has changed so suddenly and completely that you do not feel quite right about it. [Illustration: PUERTO CABELLO.] Curaçoa looks like a toy town built by a child of uncommonly incoherent mind, by taking blocks out of a box and setting them up in irregular rows regardless of size, shape, or color. The general effect is a nightmare of gable-ends and dormer-windows painted a bright yellow. Immense warehouses with great gaping doors and windows stand beside quaint little Dutch cottages surrounded by beautiful gardens, and stores several stories high, of the most elaborate architecture, rise beside low structures as flat fronted and as square cornered as a dry-goods box with a Dutch oven on top of it. Quaint dormer-windows stare at you from the most unexpected places; hideous yellow towers, like the legs of some petrified monster sticking up into the air, meet your view in all directions; and great prison-like fortresses, with port-holes like the eyes of needles, and ponderous doors lapping over like the covers of a banker’s ledger, appear with surprising frequency. The streets are narrow, crooked, and rough. They begin in the most unreasonable places and go nowhere. Some of them start broadly, but wind around like the track of a serpent, growing narrower and narrower until they suddenly end, like the edge of a wedge, against a stone wall. Curaçoa is a great place for business, although it is so quiet and sleepy that one might think the whole town had taken a dose of laudanum. It is the distributing point of a large amount of commerce, a harbor of refuge for vessels in distress, the haven of political exiles from South America, and the hotbed of conspiracies and revolutions against neighboring republics. South of Curaçoa is Maracaibo, with its curious lake, in which are towns built upon stilts, that give the name of Venezuela, or Little Venice, to this land. The explorers, like tourists of modern times, were given to tracing resemblances in America to what they were familiar with in Europe, and they imagined these huts rising on piles above the water looked like the city of canals and gondolas. But there is no more resemblance to Venice than to Chicago, and the name of Venezuela, like that of the continent, is a falsehood which the world has allowed to stand uncontradicted. QUITO.