offered a part ownership in four coffee plantations, a rubber forest,
a machine for turning the sea-turtles into fat and shell, and the
good-will and fixtures of a dentist's office. Except that I obtained
some reputation on board as a young man of property, which reputation
I endeavored to maintain by treating everyone to drinks in the social
hall, my inquiries led to no result. No one apparently knew, nor cared
to know, of the revolution in Honduras, and passed it over as a joke.
This hurt me, but lest they should grow suspicious, I did not continue
my inquiries.



THE CAFE SANTOS,
SAGUA LA GRANDE, HONDURAS


We sighted land at seven in the morning, and as the ship made in
toward the shore I ran to the bow and stood alone peering over the
rail. Before me lay the scene set for my coming adventures, and as the
ship threaded the coral reefs, my excitement ran so high that my
throat choked, and my eyes suddenly dimmed with tears. It seemed too
good to be real. It seemed impossible that it could be true; that at
last I should be about to act the life I had so long only rehearsed
and pretended. But the pretence had changed to something living and
actual. In front of me, under a flashing sun, I saw the palm-fringed
harbor of my dreams, a white village of thatched mud houses, a row of
ugly huts above which drooped limply the flags of foreign consuls,
and, far beyond, a deep blue range of mountains, forbidding and
mysterious, rising out of a steaming swamp into a burning sky, and
on the harbor's only pier, in blue drill uniforms and gay red caps, a