inity Church and hundreds
and hundreds of them. The country is very like Cuba but more luxuriant
in every way. There are some trees with marble like trunks and great
branches covered with oriole nests and a hundred orioles flying in and
out of them or else plastered with orchids. If Billy Furness were to
see in what abundance they grew he would be quite mad. It is a great
pity he did not come with us. This little town is the terminus of the
railroad and we have been here four days while Jeffs the American
Colonel in the Hondurean Army is getting our outfit. It has been very
pleasant and we are in no hurry which is a good thing for us. It is a
most exciting country and as despotic as all uncivilized and unstable
governments must be. But we have called on the Governor of the
district with Jeffs and he gave us a very fine letter to all civil and
unmilitary authorities in the district calling on them to aid and
protect us in every way. I am getting awfully good material for my
novel and for half a dozen stories to boot only I am surprised to find
how true my novel was to what really exists here. About ten years ago
---- disappeared, having as I thought drunk himself to death. He came
up to me here on my arrival with a lot of waybills in his hand and I
learned that he had been employed in this hole in the ground by a
railroad for two years. I remembered meeting him at Newport when I was
still at Lehigh, and last night he asked me to dinner and told me what
he had been doing which included everything from acting in South
America to blacking boots in Australia. His boss was a Pittsburgh
engineer who is apparently licking him into shape and who told me to
tell his father that he had stopped drinking absolutely. His colored
"missus" sat with us at the table and played with a beetle during the
three hours I stayed there during which time he asked me about ---- who
he said had ruined him. He told me of how ---- had done and said this,
and the contrast to the thatched roof and the mud floor and the Scotch
American engineer and the mulatto girl was rather striking. I never
had more luck in any trip than I have had on this one and the luck of
R. H. D. of which I was fond of boasting seems to hold good. That man
of war, for instance, was the only American one that had touched at
Puerto Cortez in TEN years and it came the day we did and left the day
we did. We saw a big lithograph of Eddie Sothern in a palm hut here so