Richard Harding Davis

Harpers Monthly/October, 1895

WE swung our hammocks on the sixth night out in the municipal building of Tabla Ve; but there was little sleep. Towards morning the night turned bitterly cold, and the dampness rose from the earthen floor of the hut like a breath from the open door of a refrigerator, and kept us shivering in spite of sweaters and rubber blankets. Above, the moon and stars shone brilliantly in a clear sky, but down in the valley in which the village lay, a mist as thick as the white smoke of a locomotive rose out of the ground to the level of the house-tops, and hid Tabla Ve as completely as though it were at the bottom of a lake. The dogs of the village moved through the mist, howling dismally, and meeting to fight with a sudden sharp tumult of yells that made us start up in our hammocks and stare at each other sleepily, while Jeffs rambled on, muttering and moaning in his fever. It was not a pleasant night, and we rode up the mountainside out of the mist the next morning unrefreshed, but satisfied to be once more in the sunlight. They had told us at Tabla Ve that there was to be a bull-baiting that same afternoon at the village of Seguatepec, fifteen miles over the mountain, where a priest was holding a church festival. So we left Jeffs to push along with the mozos, and by riding as fast as the mules could go, we reached Seguatepec by four in the afternoon.

It was a bright clean town, sitting pertly on the flat top of a hill that fell away from it evenly on every side. It had a little church and a little plaza, and the church was so vastly superior to every other house in the place—as was the case in every village through which we passed—as to make one suppose that it had been built by one race of people and the houses by another. The plaza was shut in on two of its sides by a barrier seven rails high, held together by oxhide ropes. This barrier, with the houses fronting the plaza on its two other sides, formed the arena in which the bull was to be set at liberty. All of the windows and a few of the doors of the houses were barred, and the open places between were filled up by ramparts of logs. There was no grandstand, but everyone contributed a bench or a table from his own house, and the women seated themselves on these, while the men and boys perched on the upper rail of the barricade. The occasion was a memorable one, and all the houses were hung with strips of colored linen, and the women wore their brilliant silk shawls, and a band of fifteen boys, none of whom could have been over sixteen years of age, played a weird overture to the desperate business of the afternoon.

It was a somewhat primitive and informal bullfight, and it began with their lassoing the bull by his horns and hoofs, and dragging him head first against the barricade. With a dozen men pulling on the lariat around the horns from the outside of the ring, and two more twisting his tail on the inside, he was at such an uncomfortable disadvantage that it was easy for them to harness him in a network of lariats, and for a bold rider to seat himself on his back. The bold rider wore spurs on his bare feet, and with his toes stuck in the ropes around the bull’s body, he grasped the same ropes with one hand, and with the other hand behind him held on to the bull’s tail as a man holds the tiller of a boat. When the man felt himself firmly fixed, and the bull had been poked into a very bad temper with spears and sharp sticks, the lariat around his horns was cut, and he started up and off on a frantic gallop, bucking as vigorously as a Texas pony, and trying to gore the man clinging to his back with backward tosses of attention to my two young friends. Griscom and Somerset are six feet high, even without riding-boots and pith helmets, and with them they were so conspicuous that the bull was properly incensed, and made them hurl themselves over the barricade in such haste that they struck the ground on the other side at about the same instant that he butted the rails, and with about the same amount of force.

Shrieks and yells of delight rose from the natives at this delightful spectacle, and it was generally understood that we had been engaged to perform in our odd costumes for their special amusement, and the village priest attained genuine popularity for this novel feature. The bullbaiting continued for some time, and as I kept the camera in my own hands, there is no documentary evidence to show that anyone ran away but Griscom and Somerset. Friendly doors were opened to us by those natives whose houses formed part of the arena, and it was amusing to see the toreadors popping in and out of them, like the little man and woman on the barometer who come out when it rains and go in when the sun shines, and vice versa.

On those frequent occasions when the bull charged the barricade, the entire line of men and boys on its topmost rail would go over backwards, and disappear completely until the disappointed bull had charged madly off in another direction. Once he knocked half of a mud house away in his efforts to follow a man through a doorway, and again a windowsill, over which a toreador had dived head first like a harlequin in a pantomime, caved in under the force of his attack. Fresh bulls followed the first, and the boy musicians maddened them still further by the most hideous noises, which only ceased when the bulls charged the fence upon which the musicians sat, and which they vacated precipitately, each taking up the tune when his feet struck the ground where he had left off. There was a grand ball that night, to which we did not go, but we lay awake listening to the fifteen boy musicians until two in the morning. It was an odd, eerie sort of music, in which the pipings of the reed instruments predominated. But it was very beautiful, and very much like the music of the Hungarian gypsies in making little thrills chase up and down over one’s nervous system.

The next morning Jeffs had shaken off his fever, and, once more reunited, we trotted on over heavily wooded hills, where we found no water until late in the afternoon, when we came upon a broad stream, and surprised a number of young girls in bathing, who retreated leisurely as we came clattering down to the ford. Bathing in mid-stream is a popular amusement in Honduras, and is conducted without any false sense of modesty; and judging from the number of times we came upon women so engaged, it seems to be the chief occupation of their day.

That night we slept in Comyagua, the second largest city in the republic, and which was originally selected as the site for a capital, and situated accordingly at exactly even distances from the Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean Sea. We found it a dull and desolate place of many one-story houses, with iron-barred windows, and a great bare dusty plaza, faced by a huge cathedral. Commerce seemed to have passed it by, and the sixty thousand inhabitants who occupied it in the days of the Spaniards have dwindled down to ten. The place is as completely cut off from civilization as an island in the Pacific Ocean. The plain upon which Comyagua stands stretches for many miles, and the nature of the stones and pebbles on its surface would seem to show that it was once the bottom of a great lake. Now its round pebbles and sandy soil make it a valley of burning heat, into which the sun beats without the intervening shadows of trees or mountains to save the traveler from the fierceness of its rays. We rode over thirty miles of it, and found that part of the plain which we traversed after our night’s rest at the capital the most trying ten miles of our trip. We rode out into it in the rear of a long funeral procession, in which the men and boys walked bareheaded and barefooted in the burning sand. They were marching to a burial-ground out in the plain, and they were carrying the coffin on their shoulders, and bearing before it a life-sized figure of the Virgin and many flaring candles that burned tallow in the glaring sunlight. From Comyagua the trail led for many miles through heavy sand, in which nothing seemed to grow but gigantic cacti of a sickly light green that twisted themselves in jointed angles fifteen to twenty feet in the air above us, and century plants with flowers of a vivid yellow, and tall leafless bushes bristling with thorns. The mountains lay on either side, and formed the valley through which we rode, two dark green barriers against a blazing sky, but for miles before and behind us there was nothing to rest the eye from the glare of the sand. The atmosphere was without a particle of moisture, and the trail quivered and swam in the heat; if you placed your hand on the leather pommel of your saddle it burned the flesh like a plate of hot brass, and ten minutes after we had dipped our helmets in water they were baked as dry as when they had first come from the shop. The rays of the sun seemed to beat up at you from below as well as from above, and we gasped and panted as we rode, dodging and ducking our heads as though the sun was something alive and active that struck at us as we passed by. If you dared to look up at the sky its brilliance blinded you as though someone had flashed a mirror in your eyes.

We lunched at a village of ten huts planted defiantly in the open plain, and as little protected from the sun as a row of bricks in a brick-yard, but by lying between two of them we found a draught of hot air and shade, and so rested for an hour. Our trail after that led over a mile or two of hematite ore, which suggested a ride in a rolling-mill with the roof taken away, and with the sun beating into the four walls, and the air filled with iron dust. Two hours later we came to a canon of white chalk, in which the government had cut stepping places for the hoofs of the mules. The white glare in this valley was absolutely blinding, and the atmosphere was that of a lime-kiln. We showed several colors after this ride, with layers of sand and clay, and particles of red ore and powdering of white chalk over all; but by five o’clock we reached the mountains once more, and found a cool stream dashing into little waterfalls and shaded by great trees, where the air was scented by the odor of pine needles and the damp spongy breath of moss and fern. We were now within two days of Tegucigalpa, and the sense of nearness to civilization and the knowledge that the greater part of our journey was at an end made us forget the discomforts and hardships we had endured without the consolation of excitement that comes with danger, or the comforting thought that we were accomplishing anything worthwhile in the meantime. We had been complaining of this during the day to Jeffs, and saying that had we gone to the coast of East Africa we could not have been more uncomfortable or run greater risks from fever, but that there we would have met with big game, and we would have visited the most picturesque instead of the least interesting of all countries.

These complaints inspired Jeffs to play a trick upon us, which was meant in a kindly spirit, and by which he intended to furnish us with a moment’s excitement, and to make us believe that we had been in touch with danger. There are occasional brigands in Central America, and their favorite hunting-ground in Honduras is within a few miles of Tegucigalpa, along the trail from the eastern coast over which we were then passing. We had been warned of these men, and it occurred to Jeffs that as we complained of lack of excitement in our trip, it would be a thoughtful kindness to turn brigand and hold us up upon our march. So he left us still bathing at the waterfall, and telling us that he would push on to engage quarters for the night, rode some distance ahead and secreted himself behind a huge rock on one side of a narrow canon. He first placed his coat on a bush beside him, and his hat on another bush, so as to make it appear that there were several men with him. His idea was that when he challenged us we would see the dim figures in the moonlight and remember the brigands, and that we were in their stalking-ground, and get out of their clutches as quickly as possible, well satisfied that we had at last met with a real adventure.

We reached his ambuscade about seven. Somerset was riding in advance, reciting “The Walrus and the Carpenter,” while we were correcting him when he went wrong, and gazing unconcernedly and happily at the cool moonlight as it came through the trees, when we were suddenly startled by a yell and an order to halt, in Spanish, and a rapid fusillade of pistol shots. We could distinguish nothing but what was apparently three men crouching on the hill-side and the flashes of their revolvers, so we all fell off our mules and began banging away at the rocks with our rifles, while the mules scampered off down the mountain. This was not as Jeffs had planned it, and he had to rearrange matters very rapidly. Bullets were cutting away twigs all over the hillside and splashing on the rock behind which he was now lying, and though he might have known we could not hit him, he was afraid of a stray bullet. So he yelled at us in English, and called us by name, until we finally discovered we had been grossly deceived and imposed upon, and that our adventure was a very unsatisfactory practical joke for all concerned. It took us a long lime to round up the mules, and we reached our sleeping-place in grim silence, and with our desire for danger still unsatisfied.

The last leagues that separated us the next morning from Tegucigalpa seemed, of course, the longest in the entire journey. And so great was our desire to reach the capital before nightfall that we left the broader trail and scrambled down the side of the last mountain, dragging our mules after us, and slipping and sliding in dust and rolling stones to the tops of our boots. The city did not look inviting as we viewed it from above. It lay in a bare, dreary plain, surrounded by five hills that rose straight into the air, and that seemed to have been placed there for the special purpose of revolutionists, in order that they might the more exactly drop shot into the town at their feet. The hills were bare of verdure, and the landscape about the capital made each of us think of the country about Jerusalem. As none of us had ever seen Jerusalem, we foregathered and argued why this should be so, and decided that it was on account of the round rocks lying apart from one another, and low bushy trees, and the red soil, and the flat roofs of the houses.

The telegraph wire which extends across Honduras, swinging from trees and piercing long stretches of palm and jungle, had warned the foreign residents of the coming of Jeffs, and some of them rode out to make us welcome. Their greeting, and the sight of paved streets, and the passing of a band of music and a guard of soldiers in shoes and real uniform, seemed to promise much entertainment and possible comfort. But the hotel was a rude shock. We had sent word that we were coming, and we had looked forward eagerly to our first night in a level bed under clean linen; but when we arrived we were offered the choice of a room just vacated by a very ill man, who had left all of his medicines behind him, so that the place was unpleasantly suggestive of a hospital, or a very small room, in which there were three cots, and a layer of dirt over all so thick that I wrote my name with the finger of my riding-glove on the centre table. The son of the proprietor saw this, and, being a kindly person and well disposed, dipped his arm in water and proceeded to rub it over the top of the table, using his sleeve as a wash-rag. So after that we gave up expecting anything pleasant, and were in consequence delightfully surprised when we came upon anything that savored of civilization.

Tegucigalpa has an annex which lies on the opposite side of the river, and which is to the capital what Brooklyn is to New York. The river is not very wide nor very deep, and its course is impeded by broad flat rocks. The washerwomen of the two towns stand beside these all day knee-deep in the eddies and beat the stones with their twisted clubs of linen, so that their echo sounds above the roar of the river like the banging of shutters in the wind or the reports of pistols. This is the only suggestion of energy that the town furnishes. The other inhabitants seem surfeited with leisure and irritable with boredom. There are long dark cool shops of general merchandise, and a great cathedral and a pretty plaza, where the band plays at night and people circle in two rings, one going to the right and one going to the left, and there is the government palace and a big penitentiary, a university and a cemetery. But there is no color nor ornamentation nor light nor life nor bustle nor laughter. You do not hear people talking and calling to one another across the narrow streets of the place by day or serenading by night. Everyone seems to go to bed at nine o’clock, and after that hour the city is as silent as its great graveyard, except when the boy policemen mark the hour with their whistles or the street dogs meet to fight.

The most interesting thing about the capital is the fact to which I have already alluded, that everything in it and pertaining to it that was not dug from the ground or fashioned from trees was carried to it on the backs of mules. The letter-boxes on the street corners had once been United States letter-boxes, and had later swung across the backs of donkeys. The gas lamps and the iron railings of the parks, the few statues and busts in the public places, reached Tegucigalpa by the same means, and the great equestrian statue of Morazan the Liberator, in the plaza, was cast in Italy, and had been brought to Tegucigalpa in pieces before it was put together like a puzzle and placed in its present position to mark a glorious and victorious immortality. These things were not interesting in themselves, but it was interesting that they were there at all.

On the second day after our arrival the Vice-President, Luis Bonilla, who bears the same last name but is no near relation to President Bonilla, took the oath of office, and we saw the ceremony with the barefooted public in the reception-room of the palace. The hall was hung with lace curtains and papered with imitation marble, and the walls were decorated with crayon portraits of Honduranian Presidents. Bogran was not among them, nor was Morazan. The former was missing because it was due to him that young Bonilla had been counted out when he first ran for the Presidency three years ago, when he was thirty-three years old, and the portrait of the Liberator was being reframed, because Bonilla’s followers six months before had unintentionally shot holes through it when they were besieging the capital. The ceremony of swearing in the Vice President did not last long, and what impressed us most about it was the youth of the members of the cabinet and of the Supreme Court who delivered the oath of office. They belonged distinctly to the politician class as one sees it at home, and were young men of eloquent speech and elegant manners, in frock-coats and white ties. We came to know most of the President’s followers later, and found them hospitable to a degree, although they seemed hardly old enough or serious enough to hold place in the government of a republic, even so small a one as Honduras. What was most admirable about each of them was that he had fought and bled to obtain the office he held. That is hardly a better reason for giving out clerkships and cabinet portfolios than the reasons which obtain with us for distributing the spoils of office, but you cannot help feeling more respect for the man who has marched by the side of his leader through swamps and through jungle, who has starved on rice, who has slept in the bushes, and fought with a musket in his hand in open places, than for the fat and sleek gentlemen who keep open bar at the headquarters of their party organization, who organize marching clubs, and who by promises or by cash secure a certain amount of influence and a certain amount of votes.

They risk nothing but their money, and if their man fails to get in, their money is all they lose; but the Central American politician has to show the faith that is in him by going out on the mountain-side and hacking his way to office with a naked machete in his hand, and if his leader fails, he loses his life, with his back to a church wall, and looking into the eyes of a firing squad, or he digs his own grave by the side of the road, and stands at one end of it, covered with clay and sweat, and with the fear of death upon him, and takes his last look at the hot sun and the palms and the blue mountains, with the buzzards wheeling about him, and then shuts his eyes, and is toppled over into the grave, with a half-dozen bullets in his chest and stomach. That is what I should like to see happen to about half of our professional politicians at home. Then the other half might understand that holding a public office is a very serious business, and is not merely meant to furnish them with a livelihood and with places for their wife’s relations.

I saw several churches and cathedrals in Honduras with a row of bullet-holes in the front wall, about as high from the ground as a man’s chest, and an open grave by the road-side, which had been dug by the man who was to have occupied it. The sight gave us a vivid impression of the uncertainties of government in Central America. The man who dug this particular grave had been captured, with two companions, while they were hastening to rejoin their friends of the government party. His companions in misery were faint-hearted creatures, and thought it mattered but little, so long as they had to die, in what fashion they were buried. So they scooped out a few feet of earth with the tools their captors gave them, and stood up in the hollows they had made, and were shot back into them dead; but the third man declared that he was not going to let his body lie so near the surface of the earth that the mules could kick his bones and the next heavy freshet wash them away. So he dug leisurely and carefully to the depth of six feet, smoothing the sides and sharpening the corners, and while he was so engaged at the bottom of the hole he heard yells and shots above him, and when he poked his head up over the edge of the grave he saw his own troops running down the mountain-side, and his enemies disappearing before them. He is still alive, and frequently rides by the hole in the road-side on his way to the capital. The story illustrates the advisability of doing what everyone has to do in this world, even up to the very last minute, in a thorough and painstaking manner.

There do not seem to be very many men killed in these revolutions, but the ruin they bring to the country while they last, and which continues after they are over, while the “outs” are getting up another revolution, is so serious that any sort of continued prosperity or progress is impossible. Native merchants will not order goods that may never reach them, and neither do the gringos care to make contracts with men who in six months may not only be out of office, but out of the country as well. Sometimes a revolution takes place and half of the people of the country will not know of it until it has been put down or has succeeded; and again the revolution may spread to every boundary, and all the men at work on the highroads and in the mines or on the plantations must stop work and turn to soldiering, and pack-mules are seized, the mail-carriers stopped, plantations are devastated, and forced loans are imposed upon those who live in cities, so that everyone suffers more or less through every change of executive. During the last revolution Tegucigalpa was besieged for six months and was not captured until most of the public buildings had been torn open by cannon from the hills around the town, and the dwelling-houses still show where bullets marked the mud and plaster of the walls or buried themselves in the wood-work. The dining-room of our hotel was ventilated by such openings, and we used to amuse ourselves by tracing the course of the bullets from where they entered at one side of the room to their resting-place in the other. The native Honduranian is not energetic, and, except in the palace, there has been but little effort made by the victors to cover up the traces of their bombardment, and every one we met had a different experience to relate, and pointed out where he was sitting when a particular hole appeared in the plaster before him, or at which street corner a shell fell and burst at his feet.

It follows, of course, that a government which is created by force of arms, and which holds itself in place by the same power of authority, cannot be a very just or a very liberal one, even if its members are honest, and the choice of a majority of the people, and properly in office in spite of the fact that they fought to get there, and not on account of it. Bonilla was undoubtedly at one time elected President of Honduras, although he did not gain the Presidential chair until after he had thrown his country into war and had invaded it at the head of troops from the rival republic of Nicaragua. The Central American cannot understand that when a bad man is elected to office legally it is better in the long-run that he should serve out his full term than that a better man should drive him out and defy the constitution. If he could be brought to comprehend that when the constitution says the President must serve four years that means four years, and not merely until someone is strong enough to overthrow him, it might make him more careful as to whom he elected to office in the first place. But the value of stability in government is something they cannot be made to understand. It is not in their power to see it, and the desire for change and revolution is born in the blood. They speak of a man as a “good revolutionist” just as we would speak of someone being a good pianist, or a good shot, or a good executive officer. It is a recognized calling, and the children grow up into fighters; and even those who have lived abroad, and who should have learned better, begin to plot and scheme as soon as they return to their old environment.

In each company of soldiers in Honduras there are two or three little boys in uniform who act as couriers and messengers, and who are able, on account of their slight figure, to penetrate where a man would be seen and shot. One of the officers in the revolution of 1894 told me he had sent six of these boys, one after another, with dispatches across an open plain which was being raked by the rifles of the enemy. And as each boy was killed as he crawled through the sagebrush the other boys begged of their colonel to let them be the next to go, jumping up and down around him and snapping their fingers like school-boys who want to attract the attention of their teacher. In the same revolution a young man of great promise and many acquirements, who had just returned from the States with two degrees from Columbia College, and who should have lived to turn his education to account in his own country, was killed with a rifle in his hand the third day after his arrival from New York. In that city he would probably have submitted cheerfully to any imposition of the law, and would have taken it quite as a matter of course had he been arrested for playing golf on Sunday, or for riding a bicycle at night without a lamp; but as soon as this graduate of Columbia smelt the powder floating on his native air he loaded a rifle, and sat out all day on the porch of his house taking chance shots at the revolutionists on the hill-side, until a chance shot ended him and his brilliant career forever. The pity of it is that so much good energy should be wasted in obtaining such poor results, for nothing better ever seems to follow these revolutions. There is only a new form of dictatorship, which varies only in the extent of its revenge and in the punishments it metes out to its late opponents, but which must be, if it hopes to remain in power, a dictatorship and an autocracy.

The republics of Central America are republics in name only, and the movements of a stranger within the boundaries of Honduras are as closely watched as though he were a newspaper correspondent in Siberia. I had often to sign the names of our party twice in one day for the benefit of police and customs officers, and we never entered a hotel or boarded a steamer or disembarked from one that we were not carefully checked and receipted for, exactly as though we were boxes of merchandise or registered letters. Even the natives cannot walk the street after nightfall without being challenged by sentries, and the collection of letters we received from alcaldes and comandantes and governors and presidents certifying to our being reputable citizens is large enough to paper the side of a wall. The only time in Central America when our privacy was absolutely unmolested, and when we felt as free to walk abroad as though we were on the streets of New York, was when we were under the protection of the hated monarchical institution of Great Britain at Belize, but never when we were in any of these disorganized military camps called free republics.

The Central American citizen is no more fit for a republican form of government than he is for an arctic expedition, and what he needs is to have a protectorate established over him, either by the United States or by another power; it does not matter which, so long as it leaves the Nicaragua Canal in our hands. In the capital of Costa Rica there is a statue of the Republic in the form of a young woman standing with her foot on the neck of General Walker, the American filibuster. We had planned to go to the capital for the express purpose of tearing that statue down some night, or blowing it up; so it is perhaps just as well for us that we could not get there, but it would have been a very good thing for Costa Rica if Walker, or any other man of force, had put his foot on the neck of every republic in Central America and turned it to some account.

Away from the coasts, where there is fever, Central America is a wonderful country, rich and beautiful, and burdened with plenty, but its people make it a nuisance and an affront to other nations, and its parcel of independent little states, with the pomp of power and none of its dignity, are and will continue to be a constant danger to the peace which should exist between great powers.

There is no more interesting question of the present day than that of what is to be done with the world’s land which is lying unimproved; whether it shall go to the great power that is willing to turn it to account, or remain with its original owner, who fails to understand its value. The Central Americans are like a lot of semi-barbarians in a beautifully furnished house, of which they can understand neither its possibilities of comfort nor its use. They are the dogs in the manger among nations. Nature has given to their country great pasture-lands, wonderful forests of rare woods and fruits, treasures of silver and gold and iron, and soil rich enough to supply the world with coffee, and it only waits for an honest effort to make it the natural highway of traffic from every portion of the globe. The lakes of Nicaragua are ready to furnish a passageway which should save two months of sailing around the Horn, and only forty-eight miles of swamp-land at Panama separate the two greatest bodies of water on the earth’s surface. Nature has done so much that there is little left for man to do, but it will have to be some other man than a native-born Central American who is to do it.

We had our private audience with President Bonilla in time and found him a most courteous and interesting young man. He is only thirty-six years of age, which probably makes him the youngest President in the world, and he carries on of his arm during the last revolution. He showed us over the palace, and pointed out where he had shot holes in it, and entertained us most hospitably. The other members of the cabinet were equally kind, making us many presents, and offering Grisconi a cousul-generalship abroad, and consulates to Somerset and myself, but we said we would be ambassadors or nothing; so they offered to make us generals in the next revolution, and we accepted that responsible position with alacrity, knowing that not even the regiments to which we were accredited could force us back into Honduras again.

Before we departed the President paid us a very doubtful compliment in asking us to ride with him. We supposed it was well meant, but we still have secret misgivings that it was a plot to rid himself of us and of the Vice-President at the same time. When his secretary came to tell us that Dr. Bonilla would be glad to have us ride with him at five that afternoon, I recalled the fact that all the horses I had seen in Honduras were but little larger than an ordinary donkey, and quite as depressed and spiritless. So I accepted with alacrity. The other two men, being cross-country riders, and entitled to wear the gold buttons of various hunt clubs on their waistcoats, accepted as a matter of course. But when we reached the palace we saw seven or eight horses in the patio, each some sixteen hands high, and each engaged in dragging two or three grooms about the yard, and swinging them clear of the brick tiles as easily as a sailor swings a lead. The President explained that these were a choice lot of six stallions which he had just imported from Chile, and that three of them had never worn a saddle before that morning.

He gave one of these to Griscom and another one to the Vice-President, for reasons best known to himself, and the third to Somerset. Griscom’s animal had an idea that it was better to go backwards like a crab than to advance, so he backed in circles around the courtyard, while Somerset’s horse seemed best to enjoy rearing itself on its hind legs, with the idea of rubbing him off against the wall; and the Vice President’s horse did everything that a horse can do, and a great many things that I would not have supposed a horse could do, had I not seen it. I put my beast’s nose into a corner of the wall where he could not witness the circus performance going on behind him, and I watched the President’s brute turning round and round and round until it made me dizzy. We strangers confessed later that we were all thinking of exactly the same thing, which was that, no matter how many of our bones were shattered, we must not let these natives think they could ride any better than any chance American or Englishman, and it was only a matter of national pride that kept us in our saddles. The Vice-president’s horse finally threw him into the doorway and rolled on him, and it required five of his officers to pull the horse away and set him on his feet again. The Vice-President had not left his saddle for an instant, and if he handles his men in the field as he handled that horse, it is not surprising that he wins many battles.

Not wishing to have us all killed, and seeing that it was useless to attempt to kill the Vice President in that way. Dr. Bonilla sent word to the band to omit their customary salute, and so we passed out in grateful silence between breathless rows of soldiers and musicians and several hundreds of people who had never seen a life-sized horse before. We rode at a slow pace, on account of the Vice President’s bruises, while the President pointed out the different points from which he had attacked the capital. He was not accompanied by any guard on this ride, and informed us that he was the first President who had dared go abroad without one. He seemed to trust rather to the good will of the pueblo, to whom he plays, and to whom he bowed much more frequently than to the people of the richer class. It was amusing to see the more prominent men of the place raise their hats to the President, and the young girls in the suburbs nodding casually and without embarrassment to the man. Before he set out on his ride he stuck a gold-plated revolver in his hip pocket, which was to take the place of the guard of honor of former Presidents, and to protect him in case of an attempt at assassination. It suggested that there are other heads besides those that wear a crown which rest uneasily. It was a nervous ride, and Griscom’s horse added to the excitement by trying to back him over a precipice, and he was only saved from going down one thousand yards to the roofs of the city below by several of the others dragging at the horse’s bridle. When, after an hour, we found ourselves once more within sight of the palace, we covertly smiled at one another, and are now content never to associate with Presidents again unless we walk.

We left Tegucigalpa a few days later with a generous escort, including all the consuls, and Jose Guiteris, the Assistant Secretary of State, and nearly all of the foreign residents. We made such a formidable showing as we raced through the streets that it suggested an uprising, and we cried, “Viva Guiteris!” to make the people think there was a new revolution in his favor. We shouted with the most loyal enthusiasm, but it only served to make Guiteris extremely unhappy, and he occupied himself in considering how he could best explain to Bonilla that the demonstration was merely an expression of our idea of humor. Twelve miles out we all stopped and backed the mules up side by side, and everybody shook hands with everybody else, and there were many promises to write, and to forward all manner of things, and assurances of eternal remembrance and friendship, and then the Guiteris revolutionists galloped back, firing parting salutes with their revolvers, and we fell into line again with a nod of satisfaction at being once more on the road.

We never expected any conveniences or comforts on the road, and so we were never disappointed, and were much happier and content in consequence than at the capital, where the name promised so much and the place furnished so little. We found that it was not the luxuries of life that we sighed after, but the mere conveniences—those things to which we had become so much accustomed that we never supposed there were places where they did not exist. A chair with a back, for example, was one of the things we most wanted. We had never imagined, until we went to Honduras, that chairs grew without backs; but after we had ridden ten hours, and were so tired that each found himself easing his spinal column by leaning forward with his hands on the pommel of his saddle, we wanted something more than a three-legged stool when we alighted for the night.

Our ride to the Pacific coast was a repetition of the ride to the capital, except that, as there was a full moon, we slept in the middle of the day and rode later in the night. We met many pilgrims going to the festivals during this nocturnal journey. They were all mounted on mules, and seemed a very merry and jovial company. Sometimes there were as many as fifty in one party, and we came across them picnicking in the shade by day, or jogging along in the moonlight in a cloud of white dust, or a cloud of white foam as they forded the broad river and their donkeys splashed and slipped in the rapids. The nights were very beautiful and cool, and the silence under the clear blue sky and white stars was like the silence of the plains. The moon turned the trail a pale white, and made the trees on either side of it alive with shadows that seemed to play hide-and-seek with us, and the stumps and rocks moved and gesticulated with life until we drew up even with them, when they were transformed once more into wood and stone.

It was on the third day out from the capital, when we were picking our way down the side of a mountain, that Jeffs pointed to what looked like a lake of silver lying between two great hills, and we knew that we had crossed the continent, and so raised our hats and saluted the Pacific Ocean. A day later, after a long rapid ride over a level plain where the trail was so broad that we could ride four abreast, we came to San Lorenzo, a little cluster of huts at the edge of the ocean. The settlement was still awake, for a mule train of silver had just arrived from the San Eosario mines, and the ruddy glare of pine knots was flashing through the chinks in the bamboo walls of the huts, and making yellow splashes of color in the soft white light of the moon. We swung ourselves out of the saddles for the last time, and gave the little mules a farewell pat and many thanks, to which they made no response whatsoever.

Five hours later we left the continent for the island of Amapala, the chief seaport of the Pacific side of Honduras, and our ride was at an end. We left San Lorenzo at two in the morning, but we did not reach Amapala, although it was but fifteen miles out to sea, until four the next afternoon. We were passengers in a long open boat, and slept stretched on our blankets at the bottom, while four natives pulled at long sweeps. There were eight cross seats, and a man sat on every other one. A log of wood in which steps had been cut was bound to each empty seat, and it was up this that the rower walked, as though he meant to stand up on the seat to which it was tied, but he would always change his mind and sink back again, bracing his left leg on the seat and his right leg on the log, and dragging the oar through the water with the weight of his body as he sank backwards. I lay on the ribs of the boat below them and watched them through the night, rising and falling with a slight toss of the head as they sank back, and with their brown naked bodies outlined against the sky-line. They were so silent and their movements so regular that they seemed like statues cut in bronze. By ten the next morning they became so far animated as to say that they were tired and hungry, and would we allow them to rest on a little island that lay half a mile off our bow? We were very glad to rest ourselves, and to get out of the sun and the glare of the sea, and to stretch our cramped limbs, so we beached the boat in a little bay, and frightened off thousands of gulls, which rose screaming in the air, and which were apparently the only inhabitants. The galley-slaves took sticks of driftwood and scattered over the rocks, turning back the sea-weed with their hands, and hacking at the base of the rocks with their improvised hammers. We found that they were foraging for oysters, and as we had nothing but a tin of sardines and two biscuits amongst five of us, and had bad nothing to eat for twenty-four hours, we followed their example, and chipped the oysters off with the butts of our revolvers, and found them cool and coppery, like English oysters, and most refreshing. It was such a lonely little island that we could quite imagine we were cast away upon it, and began to play we were Robinson Crusoe, and took off our boots and went in wading, paddling around in the water after mussels and crabs until we were chased to shore by a huge shark. Then everyone went to sleep in the sand until late in the afternoon, when a breeze sprang up, and a boatman carried us out on his shoulders, and we dashed off gayly under full sail to the isle of Amapa, where we bade good-by to Colonel Jeffs and to the Republic of Honduras.

We had crossed the continent at a point where it was but little broader than the distance from Boston to New York, a trip of five hours by train, but it had taken us twenty-two days.