funny as we thought them. Almost every
place we go word has been sent ahead and agents and consuls and custom
house chaps come out to meet me and ask what they can do. This is very
good and keeps Griscom and Somerset in a proper frame of awe. But
seriously I could not ask for better companions, they are both
enormously well informed and polite and full of fun. The night the
Governor asked Somers to dinner and did not ask us we waited up for him
and then hung him out over the side of the boat above the sharks until
he swore he would never go away from us again. Griscom is more
aggravatingly leisurely but he has a most audacious humor and talks to
the natives in a way that fills them with pleasure but which nearly
makes Somers and I expose the whole party by laughing. Today we lie
here taking in banannas and tomorrow I will see Conrad, Conrad,
Conrad!! Send this to the Consul. Lots of love.

DICK.

SAN PEDRO--SULA--February, 1895.

MY DEAR FAMILY:

The afternoon of the day we were in Puerto Cortez the man of war
Atlanta steamed into the little harbor and we all cheered and the
lottery people ran up the American flag. Then I and the others went
out to her as fast as we could be rowed and I went over the side and
the surprise of the officers was very great. They called Somers and
Griscom to come up and we spent the day there. They were a much
younger and more amusing lot of fellows than those on the Minneapolis
and treated us most kindly. It was a beautiful boat and each of us
confessed to feeling quite tempted to go back again to civilization
after one day on her. Their boat had touched at Tangier and so they
claimed that she was the one meant in the Exiles. They told me that
the guide Isaac Cohen whom I mentioned in Harper's Weekly carries it
around as an advertisement and wanted to ship with them as cabin boy.
We left the next day on the railroad and the boys finding that two
negroes sat on the cowcatcher to throw sand on the rails in slippery
places bribed them for their places and I sat on the sand box. I never
took a more beautiful drive. We did not go faster than an ordinary
horse car but still it was exciting and the views and vistas wonderful.
Sometimes we went for a half mile under arches of cocoanut palms and a
straight broad leafed palm called the manaca that rises in separate
leaves sixty feet from the ground. Imagine a palm such as we put in
pots at weddings and teas as high as Holy Tr