thousand feet high, called the “Inca’s Head.” Tradition says that it was once the summit of the volcano, and fell on the day when Atahaulpa was strangled by the Spaniards. Those who have seen Vesuvius can judge of the grandeur of Cotopaxi if they can imagine a volcano fifteen thousand feet higher shooting forth its fire from a crest covered by three thousand feet of snow, with a voice that has been heard six hundred miles. And one can judge of the grandeur of the road to Quito if he can imagine twenty of the highest mountains in America, three of them active volcanoes, standing along the road from Washington to New York. [Illustration: THE ALTAR.] The city of Quito lies upon the breast of a very uncertain and treacherous mother, the volcano Pichincha, which rises to an altitude of sixteen thousand feet, or about four thousand five hundred feet above the plaza. Since the Conquest the volcano has had three notable eruptions--in 1575, 1587, and 1660, when the city was almost entirely destroyed. In 1859 there was a severe earthquake followed by an eruption, which, while it did not do much damage in the city itself, caused great destruction and loss of life in the surrounding towns and villages. In 1868 the great convulsion which extended along the entire South Pacific coast was severely felt in Ecuador, where, it is stated, seventy-two towns were destroyed and thirty thousand people killed. [Illustration: A STREET IN QUITO.] There was a great scare in Ecuador in the summer of 1868 because of the violent eruption of the volcano Tunguragua, one of the largest in the group, rising nearly two thousand feet above the line of perpetual snow; but after a few days of agitation, in which immense masses of lava and ashes were thrown out of the crater, the eruption subsided without doing much damage. [Illustration: WHERE PIZARRO FIRST LANDED.] Here in these mountains, until the Spaniards came, in 1534, existed a civilization that was old when Christ was crucified; a civilization whose arts were equal to those of Egypt; which had temples four times the size of the Capitol at Washington, from a single one of which the Spaniards drew twenty-two thousand ounces of solid silver nails; whose rulers had palaces from which the Spaniards gathered ninety thousand ounces of gold and an unmeasured quantity of silver. Here was an empire stretching from the equator to the antarctic circle, walled in by the grandest groups of mountains in the world; whose people knew all the arts of their time but those of war, and were conquered by two hundred and thirteen men under the leadership of a Spanish swineherd who could neither read nor write.