Company," our next move was to secure some means of transportation over
the mountain and down to San Juan del Sur. We were each provided with a
ticket calling for a seat in the saddle or on a bench in a springless
wagon. Naturally, the women and children were relegated to the wagons,
and were there huddled together like so much live stock destined for the
market. The men scrambled and even fought for the diminutive donkeys
that were to bear them over the mountain pass. A circus knows no comedy
like ours on that occasion. It is true we had but twelve miles to
traverse, and some of these were level; but by and by the road dipped
and climbed and swerved and plunged into the depths, only to soar again
along the giddy verge of some precipice that overhung a fathomless
abyss. That is how it seemed to us as we clung to the hard benches of
our wagon with its four-mule attachment.

Once a wagon just ahead of us, having refused to answer to its brakes,
went rushing down a fearful grade and was hurled into a tangle of
underbrush,--which is doubtless what saved the lives of its occupants,
for they landed as lightly as if on feather-beds. From that hour our
hearts were in our throats. Even the thatched lodges of the natives,
swarming with bare brown babies, and often having tame monkeys and
parrots in the doorways, could not beguile us; nor all the fruits, were
they never so tempting; nor the flowers, though they were past belief
for size and shape and color and perfume.

Over the shining heights the wind scudded, behatting many a head that
went bare thereafter. Out of the gorges ascended the voice of the
waters, dashing noisily but invisibly on their joyous way to the sea.
From one of those heights, looking westward over groves of bread-fruit
trees and fixed fountains of feathery bamboo, over palms that towered
like plumes in space and made silhouettes against the sky, we saw a