Glittering Cement 195 
squalid hut, without a scrap of clothing, and fed with the 
coarsest food, was as happy as, if not happier than, any child 
I had seen. By and by an elder girl came along from some 
other hut, and told us that the man was away hunting for 
deer, and that his wife had gone to her mother’s, about a mile 
distant. She also informed us that the hunter had not a gun 
of his own, but gave half the meat of the deer he killed for the 
loan of one. He had a trained ox, which, as soon as it saw a 
deer, commenced eating, and walking gradually towards it; 
whilst the man followed, concealed, and thus got within 
distance to shoot it. He generally got two when he went 
out, and sold the hides for twenty cents per pound, the skins 
averaging five pounds’ weight each. It is astonishing that 
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 often 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 Velasquez 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 in- 
clined at high angles. I noticed also some contorted, highly- 
inclined talcose schists, full of small quartz veins, generally 
running between the laminz 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 ornamented 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 appearance of the cement is due to the admixture of 
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