roof of waving flame, and tossing, vault beyond vault, as with the drifted wings of many companies of angels.’” The railroad has been built along the very route that the first Inca and his sister-wife are said to have chosen when they started out to found their capital. Passing between two giant peaks, it descends the gradually sloping two-hundred-mile-long plateau which became the most populous section of the great empire, as it is still of modern Peru. On either side are torrential rivers that rush down through the deep defiles of the mountains to the Amazon. Every foot of the region is associated with legendary and historic events; scattered about everywhere, from the islands of Titicaca on, are wonderful ruins—ruins of towns, bridges, fortresses, temples, burial towers, some Incaic, some thought to be as old as the pyramids of Egypt. There is a lake in which, at the coming of the Spaniards, the Indians are said to have thrown the colossal gold chain that was forged at the birth of Huascar, a chain so heavy, according to the chroniclers, that it was all that two hundred men could do to carry it. The climate is delightful. All along the road is a succession of wild, gorgeous scenery, quaint towns and villages and big haciendas, with fields green with growing crops and herds of cattle and alpaca ranging about, often tended by pretty copper-colored _chola_ (mixed breed) or Indian girls, as picturesquely dressed as those of La Paz, only here in Peru, instead of the great number of voluminous many-colored skirts the Bolivian women wear—sometimes as many as twelve or fifteen, which makes them appear as though they had on the hoops once worn by our grandmothers—they wear a single, short woolen skirt over the usual cotton ones, and, instead of the peculiar headdress of the Aymaras, broad-brimmed, gaily beribboned hats, though, like the Aymaras, they wear brilliantly colored mantles, fastened around the shoulders by a pin with a spoon-shaped head (which they also use as a spoon), and the men, like the Bolivian mountaineers, wear ponchos that vie with the mantles of the women in color. Ponchos and mantles like those worn to-day, but many centuries old, have been found in the tombs, so ancient is the fashion.