nd remain silent. Life itself is
glorious. Liberty, it is pretty good; but so good as life I do not
think.'

"Three days, as I said, was the trip to New Orleans. The general man
and me got to be cronies of the deepest dye. Bananas we ate until
they were distasteful to the sight and an eyesore to the palate, but
to bananas alone was the bill of fare reduced. At night I crawls out,
careful, on the lower deck, and gets a bucket of fresh water.

"That General De Vega was a man inhabited by an engorgement of words
and sentences. He added to the monotony of the voyage by divestin'
himself of conversation. He believed I was a revolutionist of his own
party, there bein', as he told me, a good many Americans and other
foreigners in its ranks. 'Twas a braggart and a conceited little
gabbler it was, though he considered himself a hero. 'Twas on himself
he wasted all his regrets at the failin' of his plot. Not a word did
the little balloon have to say about the other misbehavin' idiots
that had been shot, or run themselves to death in his revolution.

"The second day out he was feelin' pretty braggy and uppish for a
stowed-away conspirator that owed his existence to a mule and stolen
bananas. He was tellin' me about the great railroad he had been
buildin', and he relates what he calls a comic incident about a fool
Irishman he inveigled from New Orleans to sling a pick on his little
morgue of a narrow-gauge line. 'Twas sorrowful to hear the little,
dirty general tell the opprobrious story of how he put salt upon the
tail of that reckless and silly bird, Clancy. Laugh, he did, hearty
and long. He shook with laughin', the black-faced rebel and outcast,
standin' neck-deep in bananas, without friends or country.

"'Ah, senor,' he snickers, 'to the death you would have laughed at
that drollest Irish. I say to him: "Strong, big mans is need very
much in Guatemala." "I will blows strike for your down-pressed
country," he say. "That shall you do," I tell him. Ah! it was an
Irish so comic. He sees one box break upon the wharf that contain for
the guard a few gun. He think there is gun in all the box. But that
is all pickaxe. Yes. Ah! senor, could you the face of that Irish have
seen when they set him to the work!'

"'Twas thus the ex-boss of the employment bureau contributed to the
tedium of the trip with merry jests and anecdote. But now and then he
would weep upon the bananas and make oration about the lost cause of
liberty and the m