It was at La Paz that Merriam decided to land--La Paz the Beautiful,
a little harbourless town smothered in a living green ribbon that
banded the foot of a cloud-piercing mountain. Here the little
steamer stopped to tread water while the captain's dory took him
ashore that he might feel the pulse of the cocoanut market. Merriam
went too, with his suit case, and remained.
Kalb, the vice-consul, a Graeco-Armenian citizen of the United States,
born in Hessen-Darmstadt, and educated in Cincinnati ward primaries,
considered all Americans his brothers and bankers. He attached
himself to Merriam's elbow, introduced him to every one in La Paz who
wore shoes, borrowed ten dollars and went back to his hammock.
There was a little wooden hotel in the edge of a banana grove, facing
the sea, that catered to the tastes of the few foreigners that had
dropped out of the world into the _triste_ Peruvian town. At Kalb's
introductory: "Shake hands with ----," he had obediently exchanged
manual salutations with a German doctor, one French and two Italian
merchants, and three or four Americans who were spoken of as gold men,
rubber men, mahogany men--anything but men of living tissue.
After dinner Merriam sat in a corner of the broad front _galeria_ with
Bibb, a Vermonter interested in hydraulic mining, and smoked and drank
Scotch "smoke.
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