THE TOWN OF CART AGO AND ITS LIFE 33 



cartroads leading to the neighboring villages of Dulce 

 Nombre, Concepcion de Cartago, Agua Caliente, San Isi- 

 dro del Tejar, Tobosi and the more distant villages of Pa- 

 raiso and Orosi. Others were lanes cut off by fences after a 

 distance of half a mile or so, and some of these lanes formed 

 our richest collecting fields about Cartago. 



The town was much spread out, especially along the main 

 east-west street, the Calle Real, and contained six to seven 

 thousand inhabitants. The streets were unusually wide for 

 a Spanish town and there were scarcely any two-storied 

 buildings because of the frequent earthquakes. The houses 

 were of plastered adobe and were often tinted but not usually 

 of a bright color. Our hotel was pale green, the stores across 

 the street a salmon yellow. The roofs were of curved red 

 tiles, the eaves projecting some two feet beyond the walls, 

 and the sidewalks were so narrow that in many cases the 

 eaves completely sheltered them. Only on a part of the 

 Calle Real, which leads to the Panteon, was there a sidewalk 

 as much as five feet wide. With the years, the red tile roofs 

 become coated with green and gray lichens and in the depres- 

 sions spring up ferns and Echeveria australis, a plant re- 

 sembling houseleeks. It has an inflorescence about a foot 

 high and when we arrived in May the old flower-stalks 

 were standing up bare and brown, in great numbers. The 

 rains were bringing out the new buds but as yet they scarcely 

 showed. The windows were almost invariably casements 

 protected within by heavy wooden shutters, and often the 

 house was so little raised above the ground that the window 

 sill was not more than two feet from the level of the sidewalk. 

 Our own was about four feet. 



Some of the main streets had excellent macadam paving, 

 with deep rounded gutters of solid concrete at each side. 

 Where such streets intersected the gutters were covered 

 with stone slabs at the roadway level. During the dry season 



