Page:A Glimpse at Guatemala.pdf/96

50 churches on the way home. The Ladino troopers rode back into the capital with handkerchiefs full of little golden arms and legs tied to their saddle-bows, and freely distributed the spoil amongst their friends and admirers, who thronged the streets to give them a welcome home.

During this and the following week we met many companies of pilgrims returning from Esquipulas to their villages laden with the goods they had purchased, and with a bundle of rockets tied to each man's cacaste, to be fired off in celebration of his safe return home. The pilgrims will often stop to deck the roadside crosses with flowers, branches, and green leaves, and to strew the ground around them with fresh pine-needles, and every man will pluck a green branch from a tree and strike his leg sharply with it, so as to ensure good health on his journey. Sometimes the hill Indians when journeying down to the plains will tie a small bundle of sticks together and deposit them by the roadside, if possible near a hot spring, as a charm against fevers; and every man on leaving his home will place a marked stone

ESQUIPULAS.