not know that I ever enjoyed a breakfast more than I did the one we
ate in the big cool inn with the striped awning outside, and the naked
brown children watching us from the street, and the palms whispering
overhead. The breakfast was good in itself, but it was my surroundings
which made the meal so remarkable and the fact that I was no longer at
home and responsible to someone, but that I was talking as one man to
another, and in a foreign language to people who knew no other tongue.
The inn-keeper was a fat little person in white drill and a red sash,
in which he carried two silver-mounted pistols. He looked like a ring-
master in a circus, but he cooked us a most wonderful omelette with
tomatoes and onions and olives chopped up in it with oil. And an
Indian woman made us tortillas, which are like our buckwheat cakes. It
was fascinating to see her toss them up in the air, and slap them into
shape with her hands. Outside the sun blazed upon the white rim of
huts, and the great wooden cross in the plaza threw its shadow upon
the yellow facade of the church. Beside the church there was a chime
of four bells swinging from a low ridge-pole. The dews and the sun had
turned their copper a brilliant green, but had not hurt their music,
and while we sat at breakfast a little Indian boy in crumpled
vestments beat upon them with a stick, making a sweet and swinging
melody. It did not seem to me a scene set for revolution, but I liked
it all so much that that one breakfast alone repaid me for my long
journey south. I was sure life in Sagua la Grande would always suit
me, and that I would never ask for better company than the comic-opera
landlord and the jolly young priest and the yellow-skinned, fever-
ridden schoolmaster with his throat wrapped in a great woollen shawl.
But very soon, what with having had no sleep the night before and the
heat, I grew terribly drowsy and turned in on a canvas cot in the
corner, where I slept until long after mid-day. For some time I could
hear Aiken and the others conversing together and caught the names of