One’s first impression, if he arrives at night, is that the ship has anchored in front of a South American Paris, so brilliant are the terraces of gas-lamps, rising one after the other, as the town slopes up towards the mountains. When morning dawns the deception is renewed, and one has a picture of Venice before him, with long lines of white buildings, whose curtained balconies look down upon gayly clad men and women floating upon the river in quaint-looking, narrow gondolas and broad-bosomed rafts. Unless he is warned in time, the traveller meets with a sudden and disgusting surprise upon disembarking, for the gondolas are nothing but “dug-outs” bringing pineapples and bananas from up the river; the rafts are balsam-logs lashed together with vines, and the houses are dilapidated skeletons of bamboo, whitewashed, which look as if they had been erected by an architectural lunatic, and would tumble into the river with the first gust of wind. The streets are dirty and have a repulsive smell, and the half-naked Indians which throng them are continually scratching their bodies for fleas and their heads for lice. Half the filth that festers under the tropic sun in Guayaquil would breed a sudden pestilence in New York or Chicago, yet the inhabitants say it is a healthy city, where yellow-fever or cholera never comes. A narrow-gauge street railway, or _tramvia_, as they call it, reaches from the docks a couple of miles to the edge of the city, and upon its cars the products of the plantations are brought to the docks and loaded by lighters upon outgoing vessels. Like all Spanish ports, this one has no wharfage, but ships of whatever tonnage have to anchor in the river a mile or so from shore, and release or receive freight upon barges, which are towed, not by tugs, for there is not such a thing in all that region, but by oarsmen in a row-boat. Passengers have to reach the steamers in a similar way. When we arrived there we were immediately surrounded by a crowd of boatmen, who clambered up the sides of the vessel, screaming with all the strength of their lungs the merits of their boats. Their vociferousness and persistency would make the Niagara Falls hackmen green with jealousy; and the fact that most of them were bare up to their thighs, and entirely shirtless, made the scene picturesque, although somewhat alarming to a timid person. The costume of the Ecuador boatmen is equivalent to a pair of cotton bathing-trunks, and they are as much at home in the water as in their canoes. [Illustration: THE RIVER AT GUAYAQUIL.]