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"Sí, ciertamente, señor," Gumersindo assured his companion, with Venezuelan earnestness.

"But look here—" Strawbridge laid a hand on his companion's shoulder—"do you know what George Washington did, man? He set the whole United States free!"

"But, hombre!" cried the editor. "Bolivar! This great, great man—" he pointed to the blue marble mansion—"set free the whole continent of South America!"

"He did!"

"Seguramente! And this man, who freed a continent, was at length exiled by ungrateful Venezuela and died an outcast, señor, in a wretched little town on the Colombian coast—an outcast!"

Strawbridge looked at Bolivar's house with renewed interest.

"Well, I be damned!" he said earnestly. "Freed all of South America! Say! why don't somebody write a book about that?"

Gumersindo pulled in one side of his wide-rolling lips and bit them. The two men walked on in silence for several blocks west. They passed the Yellow House, the seat of the Venezuelan Government. On the south side of this building stands a monument with a big scar on the pedestal, where some name has been roughly chiseled out. The negro explained that this monument had been erected by the tyrant Barranca, who occupied the Venezuelan presidency for eight years, but that when Barranca was overthrown by General Pina, the oppressed people, in order to show their hatred of the fallen tyrant, erased his name from the monument.