her head in the sharp angle of her elbows. The mother took another step toward the girl; her hand hovered above the bent head and then dropped.

"You know mother wants just what is best for you, don't you? I can't let you drift away from us, your head full of silly notions."

Cynthia's shoulders jerked. From the head of the stairs came Robert's shout: "Mama, tub 's full!" "Yes; I 'm coming."

Cynthia looked up. She was not crying. About her eyes and nostrils strained the white intensity of hunger.

"You don't think-" She stopped, struggling with her habit of inarticulateness. "There might be things-not silly -you might not see what-"

"Cynthia!" The softness snapped out of the mother's voice.

Cynthia stumbled up to her feet; she was as tall as her mother. For an instant they faced each other, and then the mother turned away, her eyes tear-brightened. Cynthia put out an awkward hand.

"Mother," she said piteously, "I'd like to tell you I'm sorry-"

"You'll have to show me you are by what you do." The woman started wearily up the stairs. "Go to bed. It's late."

Cynthia waited until the bath-room door closed upon Robert's splashings. She climbed the stairs slowly, and shut herself into her room. She laid the portfolio in the bottom drawer of her white bureau; then she stood by her window. Outside, the big elm-tree,' in fine, leafless dignity, showed dimly against the sky, a few stars caught in the arch of its branches.

A swift, tearing current of rebellion. swept away her unhappiness, her confused misery; they were bits of refuse in this new flood. She saw, with a fierce, young finality that she was pledged to a conflict as well as to a search. As she knelt by the window and pressed her cheek on the cool glass, she felt the house about her, with its pressure of useful, homely things, as a very prison. No more journeyings down to Miss Egert's for glimpses of She must find her own ways. Keep searching! At the phrase, excitement again glowed within her; she saw the last red wink of the fire in the garden.

escape.

I

SANTA

ANTA CRUZ DE LA SIERRA, capital of all the vast department of eastern Bolivia, owes its fame largely to its isolation. Like those eminent men of many secluded corners of South America, it is important only because of the exceeding unimportance of its neighbors. The only tropical city of Bolivia, it stands 1500 feet

some

above sea-level on the 18th meridian, very near the geographical center of the republic, so far from the outside world that mail deposited on January 7th reached New York on March 11th. Of its 19,000 inhabitants, 11,000 are female. The emporium and distributing point of all this region and the rubber districts of the Beni, its commerce is chiefly

$150,000, a fortune by cruceño standards, won from rubber, or cattle ranches round about the city. Yet there is much primitive barter, even in the town,—an ox for

a load of firewood, and the like, with no money concerned in the transaction. Santa Cruz is the place of birth of those famous Suarez brothers who are kings of the rubber districts of the Amazon.

It is a city of silence. Spreading over a dead-flat, half-sandy, jungled plain, its rightangled streets are deep in reddish sand in which not only its shod feet," by no means in the majority, though the upper class is almost foppish in dress, but even the solid wooden wheels of its clumsy ox-carts make not a sound. There is no modern industry to lend its strident voice, though the town. boasts three "steam establishments" for the making of ice, the grinding of maize, and the sawing of lumber, and every street fades away at either end into the whispering jungle. Narrow sidewalks of porous red bricks, roofed by the wide over

the two houses that all but monopolize the trade pose as Belgian, with headquarters in Antwerp. There are few Bolivian and only three cruceño houses of importance, and these for the most part buy of German wholesalers in Cochabamba. Three or four native families have as much as

hanging eaves of the houses, often upheld by pillars or poles, line most of the streets. But these are by no means continuous, and being commonly high above the street level and often taken up entirely, especially of an evening, by the families, who consider this their veranda rather than the pedes trian's right of way, the latter generally finds it easier to plod through the sand of the street itself. In the rainy season, which begins with the new year and lasts through April, there are many muddy pools and ponds in the outskirts, along the edges of some of which the streets crawl by on long heaps of the skulls of cattle, bleached snow-white by the sun, and the larger of which, almost lakes, somehow carried the mind back to Kandy, Ceylon. Frequently the streets in the center of town are flooded for an hour or more until the thirsty sand has drunk up a tropical deluge. For these eventualities Santa Cruz has a system of its own. At each corner four rows of atoquines, weather-blackened piles of a kind of mahogany, protrude a foot or more above the sand; and along these stepping-stones the minority passes dry-shod from one roofed sidewalk to another.

The houses, usually of a single story, their tile roofs bleached yellowish by the tropical sun, present a large room, wideopen by day on the porch sidewalk, and rather bare in appearance in spite of a forest of frail cane chairs, black in color. From the once whitewashed adobe walls of this protrude several pairs of hooks on each of which hangs, except during the hour of siesta, a rolled-up hammock. On or near the floor sits a little hand sewing-machine, the exotic whirr of which sounds now and then; and just inside the door are usually a few shallow tubs, like small dugout canoes, holding tropical fruits, soggy bread cakes, and sugar in all its stages; for many even of the "best families" patch out their livelihood with a bit of amateur shop-keeping.

Through

this main room, parlor, and chief pride of each family, past which one cannot walk without glancing in upon the household, a back door gives a glimpse of the patio, at

pretty garden hidden away after the Moorish fashion-how strange that the Arab influence should have reached even this far-distant heart of South America— airy and bright and large, for space is not lacking in Santa Cruz, often almost an orchard and blooming with flowers of many colors. On this open several smaller rooms which, being out of sight of the public, are often far less attractive than the parlor.

In the outside world the climate of Santa Cruz is reputed obnoxious to whites; about its name hover those legends, common also to India, of Europeans being worn to fever-yellow wrecks. As a matter of fact, the temperature does not rise higher than in southern Canada in July, and a cool breeze sweeps almost continually across the pampas about it. Mosquitoes are rare, fever all but unknown. It is not loss of health, but of his energetic view of life which the Caucasian immigrant risks. Especially during this hottest season of January, the heat was humid and heavy, and I found myself falling quickly into the local mood of contentment just to lie in a hammock and let the world drift on without me. It took an unusual length of time to make up my mind to do anything, and then more willpower than usual to force myself to get up and do it, particularly to keep on doing it until it was finished. But it is perhaps as largely due to the environment as to the climate that Santa Cruz is visibly lazy. The region round about is so fertile that almost every staple except wheat and potatoes grow. There are sugar plantations and sugar and alcohol-producing establishments scattered here and there; the province of Sara to the north supplies food not only to the city but to the rubber districts as far away as the Acre; coffee, rice, and tobacco can be produced in abundance; hides already constitute an important export; the region to the west is reputed rich in oil. Yet Santa Cruz makes small use of her possibilities, languidly waiting for the arrival of a railroad and the influx of foreign capital to develop them.

The rumors that seep up out of Santa Cruz of her beautiful pure-white types are largely of artificial propagation. It is true that she has a larger percentage of Spanish blood than any other city of Bolivia, but this is rarely found in its unadulterated form. Some Negro and considerable Indian ancestry has left its mark, and while there is not a fullblooded African, or perhaps a full Indian, in town, and Spanish is the universal, if slovenly, tongue, genuine white natives are few in number. As to the beautiful girls and women of popular fancy they do exist, but certainly in no larger proportion than pearls in oysters. The overwhelming majority are coarse-featured, with heavy noses and sensual lips, crumbling teeth that hint at degeneration and little attractiveness beyond the quick-fading physical one of youth.

The laws of Bolivia recognize three classes of offspring,-legitimate, natural, and unnatural. The second are unalienable heirs to one-fifth the father's property. The third division comprises those born out of wedlock to parents who could not marry if they wished, that is, one or both of whom is already married, or has taken the priestly vows of celibacy. The

town has little notion of the view-point of the rest of the world on this subject. Like an island far out at sea, all but cut off from the rest of mankind, it has developed customs or lack of them-of its own, its own point of view; and, like all isolated groups, it is sure of its own importance in exact ratio to the lack of outside influence; so that barefooted cruceños are firmly convinced that their ways are vastly superior to those of the rest of the world, which they judge by the few sorry specimens thereof who drift in upon them bedraggled by weeks of wilderness trails. The term "Colla," used to designate the people of the Bolivian highlands, and passed on by the masses to the world at large, is here a word of deprecation.

With few exceptions the foreign residents soon fall into this easy tropical way of life. The two "Belgian" firms bring in scores of young German employees trained in the European main house; and there are normally some 250 Teutonic residents. The percentage of these is low who are not established within a month of their arrival in any part of the region with their own "housekeeper." The recruit is shown the expediency of this arrangement by both the precept and the example of his fellow

countrymen. Celibacy is alleged to be doubly baneful in the tropics; there are no hotels or restaurants worthy the name; the pleasure of forming part of the best native family would soon wear threadbare, even if the Moorish seclusion of these did not make admittance impossible. To live with even a modicum of comfort in these wilds the white man must have a home of his own. The frail walls thereof are slight protection against theft. Unless he will reduce his possessions to what he can carry to and from his stool or counter each day, a “housekeeper" is imperative. Though a neighbor might be induced to provide meals and such housekeeping as she has time for, the cruceña brings her personal interest to bear only on those things of which she is genuinely, if temporarily, a part. To her, wages are neither customary nor attractive, the reward of her labors must be a temporarily permanent home. Hence the "servant problem" is most easily solved by adopting the servant. Whatever principles contrary to this mode of life the youthful Teuton brings with him from his native land, they quickly melt away under the tropical sun, and there is commonly little resistance to the new environment.

The then most widely-known gringo sojourner in Santa Cruz was an Englishman who chose to call himself "Jack Thompson;" his habitat the departmental prison. His story was well-fitted to the "Penny Dreadful" or the cinema screen. Some years ago "Thompson" and a fellowcountryman had drifted out of the interior of Brazil into Corumbá and offered to sell their rights to a rubber forest they had discovered. The Teutonic house that showed interest asked them to await decision, and meanwhile offered them employment in the escort of a party of German employees, peons, and muleteers carrying £7000 in gold to a branch of the establishment in the interior of Bolivia. On the trail a German of the escort drew the Englishmen into a plot to hold up the party. A week or more inland, at a rivulet called Ypias, the trio suddenly fell upon their companions and killed three

Germans, a Frenchman, a Bolivian muleteer, and the chola "housekeeper" of the chief of the expedition. The rest scattered into the jungle; except one old Indian arriero who, unable to run, managed to crawl up into the branches of a nearby tree. There he witnessed the second act of the melodrama. For a time the trio remained in peace and concord, washed, drank, and concocted a meal over jungle brush. But soon the question of the division of the gold became a dispute. The German asserted that, as author of the plan, he should take half. The Englishmen insisted on an equal division. The dispute became a quarrel. At length, late in the afternoon, when the unknown observer was ready to drop to the ground and a quick death, from exhaustion, fear, and thirst, the Englishmen fell upon their confederate with a revolver, two rifles, and a sabre. Even a German must succumb under such odds. Leaving the body where it fell, the pair divided the gold, and each swinging a pair of saddlebags over a shoulder, struck off into the trackless jungle, for some reason fancying this a surer escape than to mount mules and dash for safety in Brazil.

Meanwhile some of the refugees had reached nearby settlements. Several search parties were made up and, having buried what the vultures had left, took up the scent. The natives of these jungle regions are not easily eluded in their own element. For four days the Britons struggled through the tropical wilderness half-dead of thirst for it was September at the end of the dry season—and soon reduced to a few native berries as food. The gold become too heavy for their waning forces. They managed to climb to the summit of a jungle bluff and bury most of it. On the fifth day, a search party came upon them resting in a shaded thicket. A volley killed his companion and slightly wounded "Thompson." Leaving the corpse for the vultures, the pursuers tracked the wounded man all night and next morning caught him at bay. Having pointed out the hiding-place of the gold, he was set backward astride a mule with his hands.