they sleep. Their powers of endurance are extraordinary. Often it is the case that they will march twenty or thirty miles over a dusty road, carrying a child on their back, without water or food. When the latter is scarce they eat leaves of the coca-tree, which when mixed with lime are said to be very palatable and nourishing. Each woman carries a little bag of lime round her neck, into which she dips her fingers and draws out a few grains of powder to leaven a lump of leaves she is constantly chewing. The poor children have the hardest time, for they are always without rest or shelter, and often without food. But it is the experience they are born into, and they know nothing of a better life. The officers told me that the children often die on the march, when their mothers strip the clothes from them, and throw the bodies into the sand or woods, without even a burial or a tear, glad to be relieved of an encumbrance by death. With the battalion which boarded our steamer at Payta were two women and thirty children. They were quartered upon the hurricane-deck, without any shelter but the starlit tropic sky, and were packed in, men and women together, like steers in a cattle-car. Water and food were furnished them, the latter consisting only of frijoles and tortillas. Instead of complaining of their beds upon the surface of the shelterless deck, the soldiers told me that it was the most comfortable place they had found for months, and would be glad to stay there always; but the passengers and officers of the ship would have objected, as the stench that came from them was something horrible, resembling that which is usually noticed in a crowded emigrant-car. One night, on the unsheltered deck of the vessel, without surgical assistance or even the knowledge of the officers or crew, a child was born. The mother wrapped it in an old blanket and laid it down upon the boards. Thirty-six hours afterwards she, with the rest of the party, climbed down th ship’s side on a ladder, got into a launch in which there was scarcely standing-room, and was towed to shore, where a long and tiresome march into the mountains was to be begun the same night. On her arms was the baby, and on her back was a bag which looked as if it weighed fifty or sixty pounds. She was a mere girl, perhaps sixteen or seventeen years of age, and they said it was her first baby, of which she, like all young mothers, was uncommonly proud. This appeared to be a commonplace occurrence, for it was scarcely noticed by the other women or men of the crowd, and when I asked an officer which of his company was the father of the child, he replied, “_Dios sabe_” (God knows). He said there had been four similar accouchements in his company within six months, and that he thought the mothers and babies were all doing well. “Will the child live?” I asked the surgeon. “Live? yes; you couldn’t drown it.”