A journey of a few more hours brought us to Rancho San Agustin, or, as it is generally called, El Rancho, the end of our mule journey, for a train at that time ran once a week to Puerto Barrios. This train left El Rancho on Sunday morning at 6.30, taking two days for the one hundred and twenty-nine miles to the Gulf, and just making connection with the weekly mail steamer for New Orleans. Although we had travelled forty-eight miles the first day and twenty-four miles the second day by one o’clock in the afternoon, our boy _mozo_, who took a different route, and walked all the way, driving the cargo mule loaded with our baggage before him, arrived just about one hour later than we did. Several other passengers for the weekly train were already there, having started a day earlier than ourselves. Our hotel was a big two-story frame building—the first frame building that I had seen in the country. It looked almost colossal by the side of a little thatch cottage in an adjoining enclosure, and had been built by the railroad company for its employees and patrons. It cost only twenty dollars a day at this hostelry in the stage money of the country. [Illustration: SCENE AT EL RANCHO.] This unfilled gap in the steel highway between the two great oceans was a blessing and delight, for a more interesting region would be hard to find. Across the great Montagua Valley to the north were the beautiful Sierras de las Minas, whose slopes are kept always bright and verdant by perpetual, though ever-changing, clouds and mists. Even though they are not snow-capped and rugged like the Alps, these mountains of Guatemala have a weirdness and fascination that it is hard to describe. Everywhere the cacti-like trees reared their thorny, spreading arms. Though the grasses of the valley were sere and dry, for this was the dry season, they were not dead, for the first few days of summer rains transform them into a carpet of vivid green. The view from El Rancho is magnificent. It is in a valley on the bank of a stream, while the range of mountains towers above it in the distance. On the slopes the green fields glistened in the sun. Although the sun was hot and dry in the village, over on the hills it was raining, and we could hear peals of thunder and see the bright flashes of lightning which accompanied the tropical outpour. A small stream that came from that direction soon became a raging torrent, thus showing the violence of the storm.