Ch. XIV.] GLITTERING CEMENT. 253 



pound, the skins averaging five pounds weight each. It is 

 astonishing that the deer should be so little afraid of 

 man as they are, after having been objects of chase for 

 probably thousands of years. Sometimes when one is 

 encountered in the forest it will stand within twenty 

 yards stupidly gazing at a man, or perhaps striking the 

 ground impatiently with its forefoot, and sometimes 

 waiting long enough for an unloaded gun to be charged. 

 The woman of the house came in before we left, and we 

 paid her for the use of her fire. She did not know how 

 old her children were, and Yelasquez told me that very 

 few of the lower classes in Nicaragua knew either their 

 own age or that of their children. 



The soil about here, for many leagues, was full of 

 small angular fragments of white quartz. They had 

 attracted my attention the day before, and I now found 

 they were derived from thick beds of conglomerate, the 

 decomposition of which released the fragments of quartz, 

 of which it was mainly composed. Many of these beds 

 of conglomerate were inclined at high angles. I noticed 

 also some contorted, highly -inclined talcose schists, full 

 of small quartz veins, generally running between the 

 laminae of the schists. Probably the conglomerates had 

 been produced by the wearing down of these schists. 



We passed through two Indian towns the first 

 Yalaguina, the second Totagalpa. At the last the 

 church looked very clean and pretty, and was orna- 

 mented with a single square tower, built of rough stones, 

 and covered with white cement that glistened like 

 marble at a short distance. The peculiar shining ap- 

 pearance of the cement is due to the admixture of a fine 

 black sand in the whitewash used. The cement itself is 



