There was a little wooden hotel in the edge of a banana grove, facing
the sea, that catered to the tastes of the few foreigners that had
dropped out of the world into the _triste_ Peruvian town. At Kalb's
introductory: "Shake hands with ----," he had obediently exchanged
manual salutations with a German doctor, one French and two Italian
merchants, and three or four Americans who were spoken of as gold men,
rubber men, mahogany men--anything but men of living tissue.

After dinner Merriam sat in a corner of the broad front _galeria_ with
Bibb, a Vermonter interested in hydraulic mining, and smoked and drank
Scotch "smoke." The moonlit sea, spreading infinitely before him,
seemed to separate him beyond all apprehension from his old life. The
horrid tragedy in which he had played such a disastrous part now
began, for the first time since he stole on board the fruiter, a
wretched fugitive, to lose its sharper outlines. Distance lent
assuagement to his view. Bibb had opened the flood-gates of a stream
of long-dammed discourse, overjoyed to have captured an audience that
had not suffered under a hundred repetitions of his views and
theories.

"One year more," said Bibb, "and I'll go back to God's country. Oh, I
know it's pretty here, and you get _dolce far niente_ handed to you in
chunks, but this country wasn't made for a white man to live in.
You've got to have to plug through snow now and then, and see a game
of baseball and wear a stiff collar and have a policeman cuss you.
Still, La Paz is a good sort of a pipe-dreamy old hole. And Mrs.
Conant is here. When any of us feels particularly like jumping into
the sea we rush around to her house and propose. It's nicer to be
rejected by Mrs. Conant than it is to be drowned. And they say