TURRUCARES AND RIO GRANDE DE TARCOLES 379 



iron water tank, on a cut-stone base, for the locomotives. 

 At one side of it was a cement water trough with constantly 

 flowing water, where the population, both male and female, 

 gathered in the mornings for their somewhat limited ablu- 

 tions, some not forgetting to bring toothbrushes, some ba- 

 sins, while others came without anything in the way of im- 

 plements. 



There were a number of small, poor houses near the sta- 

 tion. People coming from or going to the town of Atenas, 

 eight kilometers distant, left their horses in a covered shed 

 adjoining the hotel on the west, or had them brought 

 thither. 



Having placed my things in one of the one-bed rooms, I 

 walked to the pretty brook in the Quebrada de Salas, two 

 or three hundred feet east of the station, and went up its 

 bed much farther than on the previous visit in December. 

 For some distance its banks, which are of rock throughout, 

 become higher and more vertical, then lower again farther 

 upstream. A young man and a girl, sixteen to twenty per- 

 haps, became interested in what I was doing and caught 

 such insects as they could in their fingers and brought them 

 to me. At one place where pifiuelas made it difficult to fol- 

 low the brook, I turned into a potrero where stood a "cor- 

 tess" tree, which was a mass of golden flowers but had no 

 leaves whatever. I broke off a flower cluster of twenty-seven 

 flowers, each flower with a corolla of five partly united yellow 

 petals streaked on the inner side of the tubular portion with 

 pale purple lines. The flowers were two to three inches long 

 and nearly two inches across at the mouth of the corolla. 

 As one looked up to the Aguacate Mountains these golden- 

 crowned cortess trees dotted the hillsides here and there, 

 taking the place of the poro-poro trees blooming a few 

 months before. According to Professor Pittier the cortess 

 or corteza {Tecoma chrysantha, one of the Bignoniacese) is 



