In Ecuador there are no smaller coins than the quartillo, and change is therefore made by the use of bread. On his way to market the purchaser stops at the bakery and gets a dozen or twenty breakfast-rolls, which cost about one cent each, and the market-women receive them and give them as change for small purchases. If you buy a cent’s worth of anything and offer a quartillo in payment, you get a breakfast-roll for the balance due you. The landlord at the hotel requires you to pay your board in advance, because he has no money to buy food and no credit with the market-men; the muleteers ask for their fees before starting, because their experience teaches them wisdom. There is scarcely a building in the whole republic in process of construction or even undergoing repairs. Death seems to have settled upon everything artificial, but Nature is in her grandest glory. [Illustration: A TYPICAL COUNTRY MANSION.] Architecturally, Quito is not unlike other Spanish-American towns, except that it is dirtier and a little more dilapidated. There is not even an excuse for a hotel, and private hospitality is restricted by the poverty of the people. Few people ever go there--only those who are compelled--and the demand for a hotel is not sufficient to justify the establishment of one. One-fourth of the entire city is covered with convents, and every fourth person you meet is a priest, or a monk, or a nun. There are monks in gray, monks in blue, monks in white, monks in black, and orders that no one ever heard of before. There are all sorts of priests, also, in all sorts of rigs, wearing the outlandish hats which are seen elsewhere only upon the theatrical stage. Some of the holy fathers look as if they had just been “making up” for a comic opera, and the jolly or grim old fellows one sees in Vibert’s pictures are found on almost every corner in Quito. [Illustration: A WAYSIDE SHRINE.]