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Worthington entered a certain jeweller's shop, and laid on the counter a bracelet of golden chain-work, the clasp set with a single large pearl. "I want to trace this," he said. "I found it, and fancy it may have been stolen and secreted; the case was pretty far gone, but I made out your name on it. Can you tell me anything about it?"

"I shouldn't wonder if I could," said the jeweller. "Mr. Leopold bought that bracelet from me last summer some time. I did not ask any questions."

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Thank you," said the doctor; "that's all I want to know."

He stumbled a little in getting into his buggy. "Poor fellow!" he said, brushing the back of his glove across his eyes. The next evening he drove out alone-thus proving himself worthy to be Pearl's brother-and replaced deeper beneath the soil of his sister's grave than he had found it, the pearl-set bracelet. The paper in which he had wrapped it was a receipt for house-rent, with one large round blot of ink upon it.

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SOCIAL AND INTELLECTUAL CONDITION OF EASTERN PERU.
BY COURTENAY DE KALB.

ERU consists of three regions, distinguished from each other by physical characteristics of the utmost dissimilitude. The almost rainless western coast descends in a series of plateaus and picturesque valleys to the sea. Here are centred that higher culture and progressive activity which give Peru her standing among the nations of the earth. Rimmed about with lofty mountains, extensive interior valleys stretch in a chain from north to south, subduing the asperity of naked rocks and fields of snow with their bloom and verdure. Except in the case of a favored few, those born here are fated to life-long isolation, relieved only at infrequent intervals by scanty news of the larger life of the world, brought in when mule trains toil across that wall of cold blue peaks which limits their vision forever. East of all this occurs an abrupt transition from the mountains to the broad, low-lying forests of the Amazonian basin.

The silent solitudes and torpor of the tropical wilderness seem to have placed a spell over life in all its forms, while nature has almost interdicted labor by that lavish abundance which renders the problem of existence so easy of solution. With an imperturbable gravity and serene contentment, the inhabitants of this region glide on the stream of time unembarrassed by need of serious forecast, for the opportunities of all days are to them the same.

Eastern Peru, though changing its political title at various periods, has been called the Montaña, or wooded country, since the first colony was planted there two hundred and fifty-six years ago. The

experiences of the early settlers were an endless succession of romantic adventures. Towns were built and destroyed many times, and there is scarcely a single site which has not been bathed with the blood of white and Indian through centuries of conflict. Spanish and Peruvian possession of this territory has consequently been more nominal than real until within the last twenty years, during which time several of the old mission stations have flourished forth into cities of from two thousand to six thousand inhabitants, under the commercial stimulus given by opening the Amazon to the flags of all nations in 1866. Accordingly the majority of the pure whites now living in the Montaña are either Peruvians originally from the west coast, or Germans, French, and English, with two or three Americans, who have been allured into this remote corner of the globe by the prospect of speedily amassing fortunes in the rubber trade. These new-comers are often noble examples of manhood, full of that courage and determination which are needful in establishing government and commercial prosperity in the midst of a somnolent and sometimes treacherous native population. Women of apparently equal rank are, however, conspicuously absent. Almost without exception they belong to the class of cholos, or half-breeds. The Indian element is strong in the features of this mixed race, although at times the Caucasian blossoms out in a clear-cut arching mouth, a delicate face and chin, and a thin aquiline nose. The young women possess the feminine instinct of neatness

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in dress and love of personal adornment. Simple pink or light blue frocks trimmed with a bit of lace or ribbons make a cool, becoming costume. The dark hair is secured behind by a ribbon, from which it falls loose down the back. A few pinks and rose-buds half encircle the head like a broken wreath. Out-of-doors a Panamá hat is worn well down over the eyes, and a thin blue and white shawl invariably envelops the shoulders. But the dirt of loosely constructed houses and the dampness and mildew of a tropical climate render it difficult to preserve undiminished the spirit of neatness, and at last with age they lapse into the slovenliness of the typical old women of the country, becoming shrivelled, toothless, holloweyed, and innocent of any attention to grace of manner or tidiness of appearance. The men are more prepossessing. A youthful beauty of physical strength and vigor ripens into a rugged weather-beaten aspect, which masks the lines of age. The cholos rival the Indians in number throughout eastern Peru, which fact alone serves as circumstantial evidence

turer must either become an exile or found here his home. There has not been in the past, nor is there to-day, any reluctance to intermarriage between white and Indian. Indeed a foreigner seldom remains here long without becoming married. The Montaña of

Peru is a lonely place. For a man who must live here for years, apart from friends and kindred, it certainly must become fearfully lonely. The outer world almost loses its reality, and ebbs from the memory into the dimness of a dream. He sees perpetually a few faces which represent humanity and all human affections, hopes, aspirations to him, until at last he fancies he can see the promise of an ideal life in those dark lustrous eyes, forgetting the tawny skin, the harsh speech, the want of noble bearing. It is, after all, a human soul, and the human soul flashing through intelligent eyes is always suggestive of infinite possibilities. So he estimates the spirit at the value of its potentiality, being hungry for sympathy, and hence not careful to avoid the enticement of dark eyes flashing on him. Then he becomes tied irrevocably to the soil, and realizes too late that the innate power of youth needs somewhat more than the narrow opportunities of a tropical wilderness for its development. The disappointment, moreover, is not confined to him alone.

Few inducements to matrimony are so powerful among these women as the hope of its leading ultimately to their permanent removal to Europe, and many a chola wife, attractive only in the lonely Montaña, has seen this fond dream fade away with the growing years without suspecting the cause of that hesitancy in her spouse which was dooming her to end her days in the land where she was born.

Despite the privations, sorrows, blasted hopes, of the whites and cholos, they form the light relief on the darker background

the whole mould of his features is heavy and fierce, even forbidding at times; but he confesses the superiority of a conquering race in his manner. While in repose he wears the determined, independent air of the savage; address him, and he chuckles, and twists his body nervously, after the fashion of a bashful school-boy. The women are even uglier than the men, and are indistinguishable from them by any difference in dress, the simple wide band of brown or blue cloth, woven by their own hands from the cotton of the country, forming their only garment.

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of the cameo of East Peruvian life, for fewer and feebler still are the illuminations of the Indian's existence here. It matters little whether he be an infiel (infidel) or a cristiano, the limitations to his happiness are nearly the same. The latter has nominally accepted a new faith. He has certainly accepted a Christian," otherwise a Spanish, name, and he has at the same time passed under the yoke of serfdom. The infidel, on the contrary, retains the privileges of an autonomous being. He is a true child of nature, barefooted, bareheaded, bare to the waist also; wearing only a strip of cloth girded about the loins and hanging down to the knees. He is of inferior stature, but strong and sinewy; his nose is short and broad, rarely arched; his long hair is bound close to his head by a band of some plaited fibre;

VOL. LXXXV.-No. 505.-13

Upon arriving at a chacra, which ancient name for an Indian hut has come to be applied to all haciendas in the Montaña, a grassy flat, or plano, is discovered, with a single large house, and a number of little palm-thatched structures strung in a line like a street, around which, and scattered in groups along the river, will be the Indians in their half nudity and dismal filth, chattering like a flock of parrots. At a word from the master, off they go to their work, garrulous and merry as

ever.

Women come and go, always reserved and stolid, often sullen. Next you may see a file of Indians passing along in front of the line of huts. You speedily become aware that these are intruders, for the women shrink into the houses, closing the doors behind them; children surprised at some distance from their homes are run

ning like frightened rabbits; while the men near you exclaim, in a stage-whisper, "In fieles!" You would never have guessed it yourself, so fine and fictitious often is the line that separates the cristiano from his savage brother. When they are safely gone, there is a sigh of relief over this deliverance from the presence of the infidel monster. This horror exists without apparent cause. The savages no longer sweep with fire and carnage the villages of the Christians; but there exists this dread of a being regarded as radically differing from themselves, whose hand or garment even it were a sort of pollution to touch. This is the most notable prejudice against a class or race, as such, any where discoverable in the Montaña.

The don, living here in his casa de hacienda like a lord in his castle, having a numerous vassalry at his beck planting, reaping, distilling his aguardiente, tending his flocks of cattle-far though he be above them, remote as master must ever be from slave, frequently betrays in his swart skin the same blood as that which flows in the veins of those he rules. Sometimes he may be a white, again a mestizo, or even an Indian, with the Indian's black waveless hair and heavy features. He would have become a chief had he been a savage; he is now a don because of his estate, which lends him dignity. He has had the genius not to continue in poverty and helpless dependence, therefore he becomes the peer of the proudest in his native land. It is one of the anomalies of eastern Peru that a people so long kept in servitude have acquired no taint of social degradation in consequence; that neither aborigine nor cholo is any where spurned because of his blood; that, in fact, no one thinks of his racial origin, but is content with knowing his claims upon respect as a citizen of the commonwealth. The final distinction between men is founded, then, upon their riches -a not uncommon distinction in other lands; but riches here become too often translatable into the mere ability a man possesses to get himself served by others, to avoid manual labor of every sort. It is a remnant of those landed aristocracies still in operation here, not only in Peru, but in nearly the whole of Spanish America, destined soon to fade into the nebula of the historic past here as elsewhere.

Slavery has no recognition in Peruvian law, but there are ways of maintaining and explaining it not unworthy of some admiration for their cleverness. Take, for example, an established chacra, or hacienda-any hacienda. Here is the large space cleared of forest, the casa de hacienda, the row of quinchas, or Indian huts, where dwell the gentes, brazos — plantation hands, as we might call them. It looks like a little town, or pueblo, but such in reality it is not. Common parlance, with due discrimination, calls it a chacra. In a pueblo ownership is divided between two or many parties; a chacra acknowledges the ownership of a single individual. The quinchas may have been built by the gentes who occupy them. No matter! The ground on which they stand belongs to the don, and the time taken in constructing them was graciously given in respite from other duties. The product of this labor, then the quincha, to wit--most undeniably belongs to the owner of the chacra! In no wise can it credit the Indian anything in his account with his master. But, according to law, the Indian is a free man. Certainly! Also, according to law, no man-white, mestizo, or Indian-may leave the place where he has contracted a debt until he has paid it, if his creditors choose to enjoin (embargar) him. Now it happens that the Indians are all and always heavily in debt to the owner of the chacra where they live, and said owners do choose to enjoin them, wherefore the Indian remains perpetually embargoed. When the young Indian has grown large enough to do what may be regarded as a man's work, he enters service. ceives the habitual recompense of nine soles* per month. On this sum he cannot live. The master knows it; the Indian knows it; but what is to be done when such is the established stipend throughout the length and breadth of the valley? The result is, receiving none of the commonest necessaries of life gratuitously, he overdraws from the first. A strict account is kept of all that he obtains from his master of food, clothing, implements, and knickknacks; papers of injunction are duly served, and he is compelled to work on day after day in satisfaction of the debt,

He re

* In the Montaña the silver sol is rated at 80 cents, but its purchasing power is equal to no more than 40 cents in the United States.

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THE PREFECT'S PALACE AND THE CALLE DEL MALECON, IQUITOS.

which with each setting sun has grown more irredeemably large above him. The Indian thus comes to think of himself as a fixture at the chacra. The magnitude of his debt concerns him not. The more he can induce his master to let him owe, so many more of the comforts of this world does he enjoy, and so much the greater is his bliss.

Consider another phase of the matter. If a man desires to establish a new hacienda, he can obtain all the land he may need by simply "denouncing" it in due legal form, occupying, and building a house on it; but he cannot secure laborers by spreading the rumor of his wishes and summoning a crowd of applicants from which to choose. For these he must repair to some well-stocked hacienda where there are Indians to spare, pay the debts of such as he selects, there by transferring the Indian, with his obligation and its attendant bond of servitude, from one master to another. Sometimes an Indian's debt will amount to seven hundred soles.*

In all this it has not been intended to imply that the dons of eastern Peru are cruel masters, nor that the Indians are unhappy. Perhaps a realization of his condition flashes across the Indian mind at times. In fact now and then he gath *This system of "peonage" is much the same in many parts of Spanish America.

At other times

ers together his few possessions-his hammock, machete, blow-gun, and fishingtackle and sets out at night in his canoe, only to enter a life of greater misery among the savages, perchance even to be killed and eaten by them. a brutal master gains retributive death at the hands of those he had maltreated, and they announce, We had to kill our patron." "Patron," akin to father, they call him, even when the term has lost its significance, when he has ceased to be a father, and has driven them to such fearful desperation. It is not exactly padre, but the name carries with it the patriarchal idea, and has in it the note of kindness. By long servitude the Indians have been reduced to a state of helplessness, such that they look to this man who governs them as children do to a father, and he is in reality their friend, protector, guide, watching over them in health, caring for them tenderly in sickness. The patron's children romp and play with those of the gentes; and the latter, even when they have become great lubberly boys and full-grown girls, may often be heard addressing the patron's wife as mama."

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Every morning the whole troop of men engaged upon the hacienda passes the patron's porch, each one saluting him with a pleasant buenos dias, pausing a moment until the greeting has been returned, and the customary cup of aguar

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