Good night, Starlight?”
Yours—Ulswater.
(End of Dr. Ulswater's Fourth and Last Manuscript. )
CHAPTER XXIII—I RESUME THE NARRATIVE. THE PORTATE ULTIMATUM
THE city of Portate, on the west coast of South America, when I knew it, had already a distinct flavour of enterprise. Two Northern companies had much to do with its affairs. One of them, The Union Electric, had the trolleys and the street lighting; the other had been longer on the ground, was called The Transport Company, and owned the inland railroad and the principal line of steamers in the harbour. I had charge of The Union Electric plant. Both were large companies operating in numerous South-American cities.
There is a river called the Jiron, which runs down from the mountains, and makes a green strip through a desert land, and so on through Portate to the sea. Even from the sea you can make out the white caps of the Andes; but in the heats of Portate, you decline to believe that the white is snow.
Portate is the seaport of the country. There is a telegraph line running inland to the capital. The monkeys do gymnastics on the wires, and the natives steal sections of it to tie their roofs on with, on the theory that the thing is plain foolishness, and the enterprise of fools is the profit of the wise. Then you go around and lam the native and take the wire, but he stays by his own opinion, and the Government wants to know what you mean by allowing official messages to be interrupted; for, they say, monkeys and roofs are not in the contract, and call it improper frivolity to mention them: “Why tie on roofs with official messages? Why improperly submit important business to the gymnastics of creatures without intelligence?”—till you come out of it by swearing yourself blood relation to all the monkeys on the Jiron, which seems as satisfactory as anything, being put down to the inherited madness of the Northerner. There are several varieties of monkeys on the Jiron.
In the city of Portate there are wharves, which float off to sea in freshets, and have to be pursued and brought back in disgrace. The trolley line goes from the wharves to the Plaza, and then visiting about town. The telephones and electric lights are the pride of the enlightened, but the unenlightened think they are run by connection with that pit of the sinful about which Padre Rafael is an authority.