156 ELIZABETH CARY AGASSIZ 
try people in their bright dresses, the men in ponchos, 
the women in gay shawls worn like a kind of mantle. 
Oh, if I could only make effective sketches, what 
pretty ones I could bring home! 
At ten o’clock they served us an excellent break- 
fast (I forgot, by the way, to say that early in the 
morning Monsieur Morro arrived and expressed the 
greatest cordiality, regretting only that he had not 
been there to receive us the day before); breakfast 
over we started again, crossing the river on a raft, a 
lancha as they call them here. Our ride today was 
only of four or five hours to the town of Chilian, quite 
a large old Spanish town. Our road lay through the 
valley of Chilian, a broad flat plain bordered by the 
Cordillera of the Andes to the East. Again the same 
fascinating scenes along the roadside. I never failed, 
when we stopped to change horses, to get down from 
the coach and go into some of the wayside huts. In 
one porch I found an old woman sitting in the sun 
and spinning wool, but after a laborious primitive 
fashion. She had no wheel, only a rough spindle on 
which she threaded out the wool to the necessary fine- 
ness by the hand, stretching it and smoothing out the 
inequalities till she had filled the spindle, then begin- 
ning it again and thinning it out more and more. She 
showed me the cloth that was made from it. In an- 
other, the family was sitting around their dinner on 
the mud floor. Here were many grapes hanging up 
in the thatch, of which they offered us a number of 
bunches, declining pay, but not refusing a little pres- 
ent of money. 
