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

federal idea), which meant the families of pure Spanish descent,considered Charles as one of themselves. With sucha family record, no one could be more of a Costaguanerothan Don Carlos Gould; but his aspect was so characteristicthat in the talk of common people he was just the Inglez—the Englishman of Sulaco. He looked more English than acasual tourist, a sort of heretic pilgrim, however, quite unknownin Sulaco. He looked more English than the lastarrived batch of young railway engineers, than anybodyout of the hunting-field pictures in the numbers of Punchreaching his wife’s drawing-room two months or so afterdate. It astonished you to hear him talk Spanish (Castillan,as the natives say) or the Indian dialect of the countrypeopleso naturally. His accent had never been English;but there was something so indelible in all these ancestralGoulds—liberators, explorers, coffee planters, merchants,revolutionists—of Costaguana, that he, the only representativeof the third generation in a continent possessing its ownstyle of horsemanship, went on looking thoroughly Englisheven on horseback. This is not said of him in the mockingspirit of the Llaneros—men of the great plains—who thinkthat no one in the world knows how to sit a horse but themselves.Charles Gould, to use the suitably lofty phrase, rodelike a centaur. Riding for him was not a special form of exercise;it was a natural faculty, as walking straight is to allmen sound of mind and limb; but, all the same, when canteringbeside the rutty ox-cart track to the mine he lookedin his English clothes and with his imported saddlery asthough he had come this moment to Costaguana at his easy