Peru in the Guano Age

God made the good man: but it would seem that His Divine Majesty threw aces when He created mankind.

Man instinctively inclines to good, but deceit poisons his soul and makes him an egotist, that is to say, perverse.

Whosoever would aspire to a large harvest of evils, let him begin by sowing benefactions.

Such is humanity, and very right was the King Don Alonso the Wise, when he said-'If this world was not badly made, at least it appeared to be so.'

Don Pedro Campos de Ayala was, somewhere about the year 1695, a rich Spanish merchant, living in the neighbourhood of Lima, on whom misfortunes poured like hail on a heath.

Generous to a fault, there was no wretchedness he did not alleviate with his money, no unfortunate he did not run to console. And this without fatuity, and solely for the pleasure he had in doing good.

But the loss of a ship on its way from Cadiz with a valuable cargo, and the failure of some scoundrels for whom Don Pedro had been bound, reduced him to great straits. Our honourable Spaniard sold off all he possessed, at great loss, paid his creditors, and remained without a farthing.

With the last copper fled his last friend. He wished to go to work again, and applied to many whom, in the days of his opulence, he had helped, and solely to whom they were indebted for what they had, to give him some employment.

Then it was he discovered how much truth is contained in the proverb which says 'There are no friends but God, and a crown in the pocket.'

Even by the woman whom he had loved, and in whose love he believed like a child, it was very clearly revealed to him that now times had indeed changed.

Then did Don Pedro swear an oath, that he would again become rich, even though to make his fortune he should have recourse to crime.

The chicanery of others had slain in his soul all that was great, noble, and generous; and there was awakened within him a profound disgust for human nature. Like the Roman tyrant, he could have wished that humanity had a head that he might get it on to a block; there would then be a little chopping.

He disappeared from Lima, and went to settle in Potosi.

A few days before his disappearance, there was found dead in his bed a Biscayan usurer. Some said that he had died of congestion, and others declared that he had been violently strangled with a pocket handkerchief.

Had there been a robbery or the taking of revenge? The public voice decided for the latter.

But no one conceived the lie that this event coincided with the sudden flight of our Protagonist.

And the years ran on, and there came that of 1706, when Don Pedro returned to Lima with half a million gained in Potosi.

But he was no longer the same man, self-denying and generous, as all had once known him.

Enclosed in his egotism, like the turtle in his shell, he rejoiced that all Lima knew that he was again rich; but they likewise knew that he refused to give even a grain of rice to St. Peter's cock.

As for the rest, Don Pedro, so merry and communicative before, became changed into a misanthrope. He walked alone, he never returned a salutation, he visited no one save a well-known Jesuit, with whom he would remain hours together in secret converse.

All at once it became rumoured that Campos de Ayala had called a notary, made his will, and left all his immense fortune to the College of St. Paul.

But did he repent him of this, or was it that some new matter weighed heavily on his soul? At any rate, a month later he revoked his former will and made another, in which he distributed his fortune in equal proportions among the various convents and monasteries of Lima; setting apart a whole capital for masses for his soul, making a few handsome legacies, and among them one in favour of a nephew of the Biscayan of long ago.

Those were the times when, as a contemporary writer very graphically says, 'the Jesuit and the Friar scratched under the pillows of the dying to get possession of a will.'

Not many days passed after that revocation, when one night the Viceroy, the Marquis de Castil-dos-Rius, received a long anonymous letter which, after reading and re-reading, made his excellency cogitate, and the result of his cogitation was to send for a magistrate whom he charged without loss of time with the apprehension of Don Pedro Campos de Ayala, whom he was to lodge in the prison of the court.