They are always slender, generally short of stature, and as graceful as sylphs; but they lose their beauty of figure with maternity, and one seldom finds a married woman more than thirty or thirty-five years of age, if she is the mother of children, who retains the statuesque grace of maidenhood. They ripen early, reach their prime at sixteen or seventeen, and generally marry at that age. At twenty-five they are fat, but they never lose the radiance of their eyes or their complexion. Their stoutness comes from the lack of exercise and the excessive use of sweetmeats, for they spend their lives in rocking-chairs, munching _dulces_, as they call confectionery. There is a romantic story about the manta which explains the reason that it is always black. The Peruvian women never wear colors in the street, and this custom is observed by the aristocracy as well as by the peasantry; nor do they ever wear bonnets except at an opera, and there very seldom. The same is true of the women of Ecuador and Chili, although in the city of Valparaiso, which is the most modern in its customs and in the style of living of any place on the west coast, the use of the manta is gradually dying out, and it is worn only at church. No woman with a bonnet on will be admitted to any Catholic church on the west coast. Sometimes strangers wear them in, but the sextons and ushers invariably ask that they be removed. Mrs. Admiral Dahlgren, of Washington, in her book called “South Sea Sketches,” relates that she was ordered out of a church because she was wearing a bonnet, and misunderstanding what was said to her, took no notice of the command until quite a commotion was raised, when some lady explained its cause. A bonnet is called a _gorra_ in Spanish, and Mrs. Dahlgren was very much amused at its similarity to the familiar Irish ejaculation. It is said that the custom of wearing the manta originated among the Incas, but that they wore colors until the assassination of Atahualpa, their king, by the Spaniards under Pizarro. Then every woman in the great empire, which stretched from the Isthmus of Panama to the Strait of Magellan, abandoned colors and put on a black manta, and it has since been worn as perpetual mourning for “the last of the Incas.” There is probably some truth in this story, for in the graves of the Incas that have been destroyed by scientific resurrectionists, have been found female mummies with mantas of brilliant colors wrapped around them, and fastened [Illustration: THE DAUGHTER OF THE INCAS.]