Two months after the priest of Marcapata had dismissed with his benediction the party of confident and enthusiastic explorers, he received again his strayed flock, but this time in rags, armed with ammunitionless guns and one poor knife, wasted by hunger, baked by the sun, and tattooed like Polynesians by the briers and insects.  The good man could not repress a tear.  “Ah, my son,” said he as he clasped Marcoy’s hand, “see what it costs to go hunting the cascarilla in the land of the infidels!”

The explorations started by Don Juan Sanz de Santo Domingo came to profitable result, but not to his advantage.  Three weeks after the pioneers arrived again in Cuzco, Don Juan started another expedition, on a much larger scale, to accomplish the working of the cinchona valleys, under charge of the same Bolivians, who could make like a bee for every tree they had discovered.  A detachment of soldiers was to protect the party, and the working force was more than double.  Finally, the night before the intended start, the Bolivian cascarilleros, with their examinador, disappeared together.  It is probable that Don Juan’s scheme, nursed, according to custom, with too much publicity, had attracted the attention of the merchants of Cuzco, who had found it profitable to buy off the bark-searchers for their own interest.

The crash of this immense enterprise was too much for Don Juan.  Threatened with creditors, Jews, escribanos and the police, he retired to a silver-mine he was opening in the province of Abancay.  This mine, in successful operation, he depended on for satisfying his creditors.  He found it choked up, destroyed with a blast of powder by some enemy.  Unable to bear the disappointment, Don Juan blew out his brains in the office belonging to his mine.  A month afterward, Don Eugenic Mendoza y Jara, the bishop of Cuzco, sent a couple of Indians for the body, with instructions to throw it into a ditch:  the men attached a rope to the feet and dragged it to a ravine, where dogs and vultures disposed of the unhallowed remains.

A GLANCE AT THE SITE AND ANTIQUITIES OF ATHENS.

The day is a happy one to the student-traveler from the Western World in which he first looks upon the lovely plain of Athens.  Rounding the point where Hymettus thrusts his huge length into the sea, the long, featureless mountain-wall of Southern Attica suddenly breaks down, and gives place to a broad expanse of fertile, and well-cultivated soil, sloping gently back with ever-narrowing bounds until it reaches the foot-hills of lofty Pentelicus.  The wooded heights of Parnes enclose it on the north, while bald Hymettus rears an impassable barrier along the south.  In front of the gently recurved shore stretch the smooth waters of the Gulf of Salamis, while beyond rises range upon range of lofty mountain-peaks with strikingly varied outline, terminating on the one hand in the towering cone of Egina, and on the other in the pyramidal,