As we unloaded the mules the bells in the tiny box-like church began to tinkle, and all the people rushed out of their houses, bearing lighted candles in their hands. They hurried to one of the huts where a youth lay dying, and crowded into the one dingy room, filling it to overflowing, and raising their voices in wails and lamentations; this continued for half an hour. No priest or physician was present; only the noisy mob of half-wild people, to whom death comes as a divertisement from the daily humdrum of half-lived lives, to speed the parting soul to the great beyond. Pulcina was swarming with dogs. It seemed as if each family owned at least half a dozen. They were a hungry mongrel lot, that roamed at large, snarling at passers-by and rending the night with howls and fighting. It was impossible to keep them out of the houses, and no matter how often they were driven away they always returned to rummage among the luggage and attempt to tear open the provision-sacks. Toward morning, when the dogs had departed, pigs came to take their place. Each of them wore a long, forked stick over the neck, like an inverted Y; another stick was lashed across the bottom so that the pig’s neck was enclosed in a complete wooden triangle. This arrangement would have kept the pigs from crawling through fences, had there been any. Some of the contrivances were so large that they had apparently been made in the hope that the animals would eventually grow to fit them; but as it was, they touched the ground and made the wearers think they were constantly about to step over something, so they walked along raising their front feet like well-trained circus horses. A ride of thirty miles next day brought us to Pampa Grande. The town was anything but what the name led us to expect. Instead of a vast, grass-covered pampa, there was but a semiarid plain; near by extended the wide, rocky bed of a river that contained not a drop of water. The inhabitants had dug deep down into the gravel and scooped up the small quantity of thin mud that had collected; it is a place about the size of Mizque but wretched-looking and forsaken. Formerly it had a population of sixty thousand and was noted for the brilliancy and gayety of its annual fairs, that drew crowds even from the Argentine. Epidemics of fever, it is said, killed off many of the people, and others fled from the threatening shadow of the pestilence, until to-day the once thriving city has all but ceased to exist.