by the fusillade, he met his end with the calmness and fortitude which ever characterized him in misfortune. The usual volley laid him writhing on the ground, whereupon a soldier stepped forward and, placing the muzzle of his musket at the victim's head, administered the coup de grâce.

Thus died, in his thirty-seventh year, William Walker, "the gray-eyed man of destiny," who, had he received from his native land the treatment to which he deemed himself entitled, would probably have achieved his ideal of a slave-owning Central American Empire.

CHAPTER XIV

NARRATIVE MANAGUA TO CORINTO

Ο

N Monday morning, the third of October, we left Granada for Managua, trav

elling over the eastern division of the Nicaragua National Railway, a narrow-gauge road owned and operated by the Government. The country traversed was less broken than that about Rivas, and seemed to us uninteresting although rich and productive. Masaya, the only considerable town through which we passed, is an interesting place populated principally by Indians. These live in little, one-storied, palm-thatched houses built of bamboo plastered with mud, and half hidden in gardens and orchards. Because of the tract of ground surrounding each house, the town covers a large area; it is quite unlike the usual Central American city, in which numerous buildings of a single type, joining one another with no visible line of demarcation, produce the effect of a few enormous edifices, each covering an entire block. The centre of the plaza, contrary to custom, is occupied by an old Spanish church, probably situated upon the spot where Gil

Gonzales de Avila repulsed the attack of the treacherous Diriangan. The Spaniards, greatly outnumbered, owed their escape to the Indians' preference for capturing their foes alive and to the terror inspired by the horsemen, whose charges the natives could not withstand.

Near the town and far below it is a deep, clear lake about three miles long, surrounded by vertical cliffs rising 360 or more feet above its surface. Although without an outlet, the water is fresh, and furnishes the supply for the adjacent town, to which it is transported in earthen jars, as it was centuries ago, by aguadoras, or water-carriers women and girls trained to the task from infancy. On the west shore of the lake rises the cone of the volcano of Masaya, which, with the lake, occupies an oval area of depression about six miles long and four miles wide, where a large volcanic mountain, since destroyed by engulfment, once stood. The present peak is 2,200 feet high, and has been inactive since 1858, when it emitted a flow of lava. At the time of the conquest its vent was filled with a sea of molten matter, thought by the Spaniards to be gold; and in 1534, Fray Blas de Castillo, more courageous or more covetous than his fellows, made two descents into the crater, lowering a bucket at the end of a chain in a vain attempt to procure some of the precious metal. The bucket melted