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her face. "We can't give you your ecclesiastical court back again; but
you shall have more steamers, a railway, a telegraph-cable--a future
in the great world which is worth infinitely more than any amount
of ecclesiastical past. You shall be brought in touch with something
greater than two viceroyalties. But I had no notion that a place on
a sea-coast could remain so isolated from the world. If it had been a
thousand miles inland now--most remarkable! Has anything ever happened
here for a hundred years before to-day?"

While he talked in a slow, humorous tone, she kept her little smile.
Agreeing ironically, she assured him that certainly not--nothing ever
happened in Sulaco. Even the revolutions, of which there had been two in
her time, had respected the repose of the place. Their course ran in the
more populous southern parts of the Republic, and the great valley of
Sta. Marta, which was like one great battlefield of the parties, with
the possession of the capital for a prize and an outlet to another
ocean. They were more advanced over there. Here in Sulaco they heard
only the echoes of these great questions, and, of course, their official
world changed each time, coming to them over their rampart of mountains
which he himself had traversed in an old diligencia, with such a risk to
life and limb.

The chairman of the railway had been enjoying her hospitality for
several days, and he was really grateful for it. It was only since he
had left Sta. Marta that he had utterly lost touch with the feeling
of European life on the background of his exotic surroundings. In the
capital he had been the guest of the Legation, and had been kept busy
negotiating with the members of Don Vincente's Government--cultured men,
men to whom the conditions of civilized business were not unknown.

What concerned him most at the time was the acquisition of land for the
railway. In the Sta. Marta Valley, where there was already one line in
existence, the people were tractable, and it was only a matter of price.
A commission had been nominated to fix the values, and the difficulty
resolved itself into the judicious influencing of the Commissioners.
But in Sulaco--the Occidental Province for whose very development the
railway was intended--there had been trouble. It had been lying for ages
ensconced behind its natural barriers, repelling modern enterprise by
the precipices of its mountain range, by its shallow harbour opening
into the everlasting calms of a gulf full of clouds, by the benighted
state of mind of the owners of its fertile territory--all these
aristocratic old Spanish families, all those Don Ambrosios this and Don
Fernandos that, who seemed actually to dislike and distrust the coming
of the railway over their lands. It had happened that some of the
surveying parties scattered all over the province had been warned off
with threats of violence. In other cases outrageous pretensions as to
price had been raised. But the man of railways prided himself on being

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