VIII
This story, it should be emphasized again, is not typical of Costa Rica. Although the second smallest of the Central-American republics, it is the most progressive.
Fortune favored it in the beginning by giving it few gold mines to attract to its shores the swashbuckling adventurer whose blood to-day keeps so many of the neighboring countries in turmoil. It is essentially a country of coffee and bananas, and so fertile that wooden railway ties and telegraph poles are popularly reputed to take root and grow. It was settled not by conquistadores bent upon enslaving the Indian, but by Gallegos, the hardest-working farmers of Spain, who, instead of mating with the aborigines, followed the example of our own Puritan forefathers by exterminating them. To-day, when one passes the black fringe of the Caribbean coast, one finds neither the Indian population of Guatemala nor the mixed-breed population of the other countries, but a race eighty per cent. Spanish, even among the lowly peons.
Not being troubled by recurrent civil war, Costa Rica has made progress. It is not an astounding country, for most of its 23,000 square miles of territory are still clad with jungle, and its population of 400,000 people live mostly in one mountain district, where the four principal cities are connected by a wagon road not more than thirty miles in length. But its people, for the most part, own their own farms, and are contented. Education is of a higher standard than in the other countries. There is railway connection with either coast. It is such a healthful land that Canal Zone doctors always recommend it to convalescents. It has a national theater which equals in its interior decoration any theater in the United States. Yet it remains quaint, and picturesque, and Spanish—charming and delightful—so thoroughly charming and delightful that the author, after living there for a month on two different visits, discovers no further observations in his notebook.
IN ITS INTERIOR DECORATION THE COSTA RICAN NATIONAL THEATER EQUALS ANY THEATER IN THE UNITED STATES