diente has been bestowed; at night a similar exchange of salutations takes place upon the close of work. All day long the men are busy in the cane-fields, in the distillery, or in the banana orchard; the women, when not occupied with culinary duties, sit and weave won derful hammocks, mats, and hats of palm fibre, or pass now and again in a long procession to the river, whence they bring great jars of water poised upon their heads; while the don, having made his tour of inspection, reclines at ease, whiffing the fragrant tobacco of Tarapoto. So they jog on through life together, master and slave, happy, contented, and scarce dreaming how unique is their way of existence in this century of liberty. an inheritance from the days of Spanish ascendency not to be extinguished by the mere decree of a republican government; but fortunately the population of eastern Peru is so small that the present It is -not very visible certainly upon first entrance into East Peru. The forces of civilization seem not to have stirred deeply these Amazonian solitudes. But first impressions are often treacherous, and visible signs are sometimes an evidence of spent forces, beyond which there is less to be hoped for. In concrete attainment the field here is still altogether an open one; in intellectual acquisitions, however, the best class of the East Peruvians have emerged from the glimmerings of dawnlight into somewhat of the clearness of day. It is unsafe to presume upon the ignorance of these dons. Many a stranger who has thought to teach them how the outer world thinks and does has ended by receiving additional information upon the same subject in return, coupled with reasons why such principles cannot at present be applied on latitude four degrees south. In Iquitos, a city of six thousand inhabitants, is one Signs of progress are not many as yet studied, penetrated! The monthly steamboats coming from Pará bring news and the latest periodical literature from Spain, Portugal, England, and France-alas, not from the United States as yet. From hand to hand these monthly accessions pass, until they become disseminated throughout the entire breadth of these five hundred miles of Montaña. The steamboats have done more. Through that extension of trade which they have induced, small though it has been, the people have been brought in touch with the great centres of European civilization, and have been educated to European methods in many matters by the friction of commercial relations, until they realize their own shortcomings, lament them, hope to see them eradicated by-and-by. They have not yet attempted entrance upon the domain of the arts. They are making money now; laying the foundations of estates. They but sparingly introduce the picturesque into their architecture, although the Portuguese type of structure, creeping up the river from Brazil, has feebly asserted itself, as far as the materials at hand will allow. The Spanish idea appears also, especially at Yurimaguas, nearer the mountains. Here are the great porches, the balconies, the open galleries letting a bit of light through the corner of a house, A CHOLA GIRL, IQUITOS. just under the red-tile roof; the pretty inner court, or patio, filled with tropical verdure. The pollen of Indian influence has modified the exotic taste at times, where the house resembles the palmthatched quincha, and is decorated on the interior with palm-leaf mats fastened upon the walls, with the horizontally fluted huicungo-palm posts at the doorways, and above them gratings of palm slats lashed together by vines, forming combinations of grace well worthy of imitation in other lands. Upon extraordinary occasions, when a dinner is to be drawn from an amplitude of resource, which bespeak a broader culture than you might anticipate. Here will be heard enthusiastic odes with a sense of the sweetness of human sympathy, proclaims: "Charity, it is thy name Fills the soul with brightest flame! Thou leadest science to noble endeavor; On gleaming pinions, forever inquiet, Thou sweetly bearest to regions celestial, And thou wreathest with palms Him who hath rapture of music, the Poet! Thou bindeth concord and love with glad fetters; Pedagogy has had its share in educating the inhabitants of the Montañaworking in a languid manner, not going deep into anything. Pedagogy, not supplemented by adequate books here, must content itself, consequently, with merest rudiments, and those stirred up into a weak emulsion with fanciful storiesstrange rhapsodical text-books, resulting, as one might presuppose, in filling the young mind with vagaries, in creating a thirst for knowledge without quenchSimon Martinez Izquierdo. + Leopoldo Cortes. 66 ing it. Ever and again the departing traveller is besought by his host to send him "a good history of the world," a new geography," or some long-wishedfor classic volume. In the towns are schools of considerable size, supported by taxation, aided by small fees from the patrons, heralded always by the conspicuous sign, "Escuela de la Municipalidad," a circumstance of some importance in itself, keeping before the eyes of all the fact that education is a matter of public concern, is a thing desirable, and, such as it is, easily obtainable. Further advertisement of a school's existence is afforded when in session by the vociferous babel of a hundred or more brown little youngsters vying with each other in proofs of application, which proofs seem to consist in studying lessons aloud. Each chacra also has its school, usually instituted and maintained by the doña, and here again the orthodox scholastic babel breaks the stillness which else reigns like a drowsy Sabbath. The common Indian is but a savage with some of the tricks of civilization, a house-builder, a planter of maize and yucca, a weaver of cloth and of hammocks, a fashioner of works of the fictile art of surprising beauty. Without turn-table, simply by a feeling for correct form, are these jars, urns, dishes built up by hand with wooden spatulas. The decoration has become thoroughly conventionalized, crystallized, in fact, into a type of æsthetic expression which may truly be designated art. Predominant is the old classic form of fret and chevron, executed in subdued reds and deep browns upon a gray or creamy ground. Sometimes the leading design is in very heavy lines, with the ground filled in with an exquisitely delicate tracery of similar patterns. The plant life of the forests is also reproducedvines not rudely deline ated, but forming definite curves, springing upward at the end of the pattern, and expanding into the calyx which holds the conventionalized type of a corolla, now a yellow five-rayed star, again a pink-flushed lily's cup, or a sky-blue pendent bell. The artistic spirit displayed in these recalls the wonderful works of Inca art exhumed at the noted necropolis of Ancon. The same is true of their textile fabrics. Here are the same complicated designs, the same rich coloring, worked out in cotton, and in the fibre of the chambirapalm. Of the latter are made bags, called jícaras, and mammoth 'hammocks, which are, in fact, only great square closely woven lustrous pieces of cloth, with stripes and simple designs in various soft shades of yellow, brown, and red. The Indian, again, manifests his appreciation of graceful form in the rounded ends of his quincha, which give an effective curve to the palm-thatched roof. A NATIVE DISTILLERY, SAN LORENZO. SPECIMEN OF NATIVE POTTERY. On More curious still is the advance which, as a savage, he has made from a love of mere rhythmic sound to the production of true melodies, richly modulated, and often bearing in their strain a wail of melancholy so pathetically suggestive that, as you hear an Indian mother crooning them to her babe in these mighty wastes, where Nature, with all her bounty, has yet left man so poor, they seem to be telling the coming generations the mournful history of the struggles and emptiness of the past. Others have the rollicking spirit of revelry, and are indeed used in festal dances. The Indians employ the plaintive songs also in the more solemn ceremonies of the Church, and the tunes of the ancient wardance are incongruously added as a finale to the celebration of religious feasts. these occasions the Indian population arrays itself in the splendor of gay feathers and painted faces; pandean pipes and snare-drums (indigenous here as in other parts of the world) furnish the music, while all dance in circles and bawl songs in the intervals between draughts of maddening rum. The hideous countenances, in which the fire of liquor is heightened by the flush of scarlet paint, the brilliant head-dresses of macaws' wings, and these antique musical instruments, make one almost instinctively look for the satyr's cloven hoof, and the mind is driven to marvel what could have been the labors of the early missionaries; whether these, and such as these, are types of the cristianos they produced! It is much to be feared that these are indeed the very sort. But, however paltry the effects of the early missions may appear, it is interesting to note that at the present day far more than half of the native population of eastern Peru, having nominally become Christian, has entirely and forever ceased its ancient cannibalistic habits-a moral gain of considerable magnitude; that it has also come to look upon the Church as its guide, which means that, with the helpful influence of an increasing white population, it will be found amenable to higher principles when these shall be strongly preached to it. That these people did not long ago become better men may appear not justly chargeable to the old padres, upon reviewing the history of these "Missions of Mainas," as they were formerly called. It may appear that these old padres, whatever faults they may have to answer for, had at least a rational theory of converting the race, which their successors did not carry out. The first entrance into Mainas was made by Gonzalo Pizarro and Francisco Orellana in 1540. The latter, with his company, two friars among them feebly protesting, deserted Pizarro, and passed down the Rio Napo, and thence to the sea by way of the Amazon; fighting, "conquering," leaving a very bad impression of A JÍCARA. |