crescendo until it seems to drown all other noises. It is the shrill voices of the newsboys crying the late morning or evening edition of some newspaper. Other cries, like the para hoy, para hoy-y, último gauchito para hoy-y-y-y (for to-day, for to-day, last ticket for to-day) will exist as long as lotteries are the mild gamble of our lives. But if you lie awake in some by-street in the early hours of the morning, you may hear another variety of cries. They continue throughout the day, but as the city wakes to life, they become absorbed in other noises and pass almost unremarked. It is the voice of the itinerant vendors of food, hawking their wares in phrases often unintelligible to foreign ears, but which have been traditional for a hundred years or more. Many of these vendors are of Indian blood. and look as if they had walked straight out of some hut in a remote Sierra village. Although not encouraged by the municipality, which likes to see the street merchant clad in spotless blouse and peaked cap, they still persist. They are a tradition in Lima, a tradition which many would regret to see swept entirely away by the incoming tide of hygiene.

Some of these itinerant vendors come into their own only at certain seasons of the year. Others are a daily feature of our lives. Among the most prominent of the latter class is the bizcochero, or seller of cakes, with his inviting cry of pan de dulce, pan de dulce, empanaditas, pasteles. Severe municipal regulations compel him to-day to sell his cookies in fly-screened cases, but he is recalcitrant when he dares to be. His most profitable sphere of commerce appears to be the entrances of cinemas and schools.

A strong competitor during the summer is the heladero, very modern to-day with his barrow and hygienic metal containers. He was not always so. From accounts of Lima written 70 or 80 years ago, we may read how, as a means of refreshing the blood, the eating of an ice was considered to be one of the first duties of the day. From the earliest hours of the morning, the vendors of ices paraded the streets and had an established clientèle to whom they brought the matutinal refresher. So important was the trade that those vendors had formed an Unión de Heladeros which was almost entirely composed of Indians, who in dialect shouted their passage through the streets with the cry of el riqui piña y de leit (delicious pineapple and milk). They have long since been swept out of existence by the commercially organized heladerías and the ice creams of D'Onofrio to-day. Nor do people any longer take a morning ice to cool the blood.

The tamalero is still with us. He is that exotic-looking individual, generally shod with rope-soled canvas sandals and often poncho clad, who sells mysterious little oblong packages wrapped in banana leaves and slung at the end of a short bamboo stick. He makes his wares known by the staccato cry of Tamales! a medio, a medio, a medio!

Tamales serranos bien calientes! The tamal has come down to us from the times of the Incas, and is still a national dish. Made of a mixture of crushed Indian corn, meat, and peppers, it is wrapped in leaves to maintain the heat and to preserve the flavor. Liking for tamales may be said to be an acquired taste. Those who wish to experiment are recommended to make their first essay in some restaurant which specializes in criollo dishes. The glorified tamal which is served there, usually has, in addition to the essential maize, young pigeons and eggs as the principal ingredients. So served they are delicious.

More numerous than the foregoing, and with wares more wholesome, are the fruteros and fruteras. Some of them wend their patient way through the motor-driven traffic of the streets mounted upon burros and bring to the doors of the houses fruits often fresher, cheaper, and more varied than those which are offered for sale in the markets. Others station themselves and their baskets on the street curbs or in the portales of the Plaza de Armas. . . A very patient tribe this, Indians many of them, who own or rent the hundreds of little farms which run right up to the gates of Lima. Melons, avocados, cherries, oranges, mangos, and grapes are offered in their season at prices. (subject to barter) which are tempting. . . .

Changing times have eliminated the majority of the old-time itinerant food merchants from the every-day life of the principal streets. But many of them still survive in the poorer parts of the city, especially across the river and in the neighborhood of the market places. One and all come to life again at the season of the great religious feasts. Walk through the arcades of the Plaza de Armas on Christmas Eve, at Mi-carême, at Eastertide, and you shall see their descendants selling much the same delicacies in much the same manner as 80 years ago. Or even better still, make your way as best you can to the Church of Las Nazarenas at the time of the annual processions of El Señor de los Milagros when every adjoining street is one long open-air restaurant and where all the traditional dishes which have come down from the days of the Incas are once more offered for sale. Here may be seen the tisaneras, or sellers of tisanes, whose stock-in-trade consists of an earthenware pot filled with dubious water in which float slices of pineapple, lemon, or other fruits. Here are also to be seen their first cousins, the vendors of cold beverages, whose habitat used to be the Portal de Escribanos in winter and the Portal de Botoneros in summer. Here, too, come in force the buñueleras, or sellers of buñuelas-fritters of all sorts, some of them the ancestor of the American waffle. The chichera is also present, selling chicha in all its variations, from the classic sora made from maize (but no longer from teeth-chewed maize) to chicha made from chickpeas and even from pineapples.

THE GOLD RIVERS OF HONDURAS

By A. HOOTON BLACKISTON

HE source of the great treasures of the Aztecs and other Indian

TH

the Spaniards after the discovery of America, has been the subject of much speculation.

The "lost" mines of early days have often been cited as an explanation. To a limited extent this is correct, as it is doubtlessly true that rich deposits were worked then and later lost to the world, being either hidden from the Spaniards or, if known to them, closed upon their expulsion from the New World when the colonies achieved their independence. Since the natives would not work them and the colonists could not, gradually cave-ins covered the mouths of shafts and tunnels, and trees grew over bonanza mines that had made the Spanish Main famous and furnished untold millions to the mother country.

However, the more easily operated and satisfactory placers, known to the Indians hundreds of years before the coming of Columbus, were the lodestones of attraction for both natives and Spaniards. It was the gold from their sands that gladdened the eyes of the conquistadores, and started the greatest gold rush in all history that made Spain the mistress of Europe and lifted the world from the slough of the Middle Ages.

The California stampede was a feeble thing in comparison, and that of the Klondike but an amoebic struggle of small consequence. Ancient civilizations were extinguished overnight, empires upset, whole nations stamped out and a continent enslaved in the mad rush that ensued.

Spain was fortunate in early realizing the value of her new possessions and in obtaining those regions where the precious metal was most abundant. Indeed, it was the desire for gold that dominated her early conquests and influenced her colonial policy, leaving its impress on history even to-day.

Among the most famous of the alluvial deposits from which untold riches were gathered were those of the gold rivers of Honduras, where Indian women, working in the sunshine of the highlands, had been washing the sands for uncounted years to obtain the bright metal which was prized only for its use in the fashioning of images. for the gods and ornaments for men. An extensive traffic was carried on far into Mexico on the north and to the Isthmus of Darien on the

The sands and alluvial deposits along the banks of the upper reaches of many rivers of Honduras continue to yield gold in small quantities despite the fact that they have been worked for centuries.

A VISITING LADY WATCHES THE "LAVANDERAS" AT WORK The Indian "wash women" are shown using large wooden bowls to wash gold, a primitive method that has been employed through the ages.

south. So plentiful was this golden stream and other lesser ones that the Spaniards called the entire coast Costa Rica-the Rich Coast.

It can readily be understood that the conquistadores lost no time in tracing the precious flood to its source. Such was their avarice that they not only seized all the gold they could obtain from the natives and forced them to toil for more, but in addition, as iron was lacking, they tore the shoes from their horses and fashioned them into implements with which to dig, shoeing their mounts with gold.

Modern equipment is employed in but few instances in the country. Upper: An isolated example of hydraulic mining in the western part of the Republic, near the Guatemalan border. Lower: When the giant hydraulic has finished, the bed of the stream, with its gold, lies bare.

instead, as it was the commoner though more valuable metal. It is reported that one such poorly equipped expedition alone sent out from Olancho more than $120,000 in bullion. There is hardly a small stream but carries its quota of gold, and on the headwaters of the Almandares nuggets as large as 100 ounces have been found.

Because of the unusually rich stringers or small veins that permeate the river banks, and because of the heavy rainfall and the ensuing erosion characteristic of the tropics, especially in the mountainous

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