Nostromo - A Tale of the Seaboard.pdf - Planet eBook

The harbour was busy, too, with the traffic in railway material,and with the movements of troops along the coast.The O.S.N. Company found much occupation for its fleet.Costaguana had no navy, and, apart from a few coastguardcutters, there were no national ships except a couple of oldmerchant steamers used as transports.Captain Mitchell, feeling more and more in the thickof history, found time for an hour or so during an afternoonin the drawing-room of the Casa Gould, where, with astrange ignorance of the real forces at work around him, heprofessed himself delighted to get away from the strain ofaffairs. He did not know what he would have done withouthis invaluable Nostromo, he declared. Those confoundedCostaguana politics gave him more work—he confided toMrs. Gould—than he had bargained for.Don Jose Avellanos had displayed in the service of theendangered Ribiera Government an organizing activityand an eloquence of which the echoes reached even Europe.For, after the new loan to the Ribiera Government,Europe had become interested in Costaguana. The Sala ofthe Provincial Assembly (in the Municipal Buildings of Sulaco),with its portraits of the Liberators on the walls and anold flag of Cortez preserved in a glass case above the President’schair, had heard all these speeches—the early onecontaining the impassioned declaration ‘Militarism is theenemy,’ the famous one of the ‘trembling balance’ deliveredon the occasion of the vote for the raising of a second Sulacoregiment in the defence of the reforming Government;and when the provinces again displayed their old flags (pro-