when I made that last entry. And yet it was only two months ago. It
seems like two years. I don't feel much like writing about it, nor
thinking about it, but I suppose, if I mean to keep my "memoirs" up to
date, I shall never have more leisure in which to write than I have
now. For Dr. Ezequiel says it will be another two weeks before I can
leave this cot. Sagua seems very unimportant now. But I must not write
of it as I see it now, from this distance, but as it appealed to me
then, when everything about me was new and strange and wonderful.

It was my first sight of a Honduranian town, and I thought it most
charming and curious. As I learned later it was like any other
Honduranian town and indeed like every other town in Central America.
They are all built around a plaza, which sometimes is a park with
fountains and tessellated marble pavements and electric lights, and
sometimes only an open place of dusty grass. There is always a church
at one end, and the cafe or club, and the alcalde's house, or the
governor's palace, at another. In the richer plazas there must always
be the statue of some Liberator, and in the poorer a great wooden
cross. Sagua la Grande was bright and warm and foreign looking. It
reminded me of the colored prints of Mexico which I had seen in my
grandfather's library. The houses were thatched clay huts with gardens
around them crowded with banana palms, and trees hung with long beans,
which broke into masses of crimson flowers. The church opposite the
inn was old and yellow, and at the edge of the plaza were great palms
that rustled and courtesied. We led our mules straight through the one
big room of the inn out into the yard behind it, and while doing it I
committed the grave discourtesy of not first removing my spurs. Aiken
told me about it at once, and I apologized to everyone--to the
alcalde, and the priest, and the village school-master who had crossed
the plaza to welcome us--and I asked them all to drink with me. I do