Pioneers and frontiersmen should not be recruited from shops and counters. The pluck and caution needed for a struggle with untried conditions, the determination to be content with slim comforts and undaunted in the face of every discouragement, looking always to the final result, experience shows cannot be found in this class. They do well enough as eleventh-hour assistants, when the strong men have felled the forest and broken the ground and built houses and shops for these weaker but still useful brothers; but the first colonists must be of sterner stuff. Probably, had shelter and good food been provided for those inexperienced Belgians, there would have been at Santo Tomas something more to-day than the memory of their visit. In 1881 the little town contained but one hundred and twenty-nine inhabitants, mostly fishermen; but the construction of the Ferro-carril del Norte, to connect the capital with the Atlantic, changed for a time the sleepy hamlet into the busy haunt of contractors and laborers. The exigencies of the railroad calling for the deepest water, however, the new town of Port Barrios has been founded, some three miles to the eastward of the ancient village. Curiously enough, the Bay of Santo Tomas has no river; but it lies between the Rio Dulce and the Motagua. From Livingston to New Orleans the distance is 900 miles; to Belize, 125; to Kingston, Jamaica, 800; to Puerto Cortez (Caballos), 55; to Izabal, 45; to Pansos, 90; and to Guatemala City (water to Izabal, and mule-path thence), 120. The usual steamer time from New Orleans is six days, including a stop of two days at Belize; from New York, ten days, including stops at Kingston and Belize; and three days should be ample to New Orleans, seven to New York, and eight to Boston. A glance at a map will show that the course as well as the distance between Livingston and New York is much in favor of that route over the better-known one from Aspinwall to the metropolis; and when to this saving of time and avoidance of the dangers of navigation is added the greater facilities for raising and shipping fruit which Livingston is now developing, there is great probability that New Orleans will not long be allowed to absorb all the bananas, plantains, and pines, or England all the coffee and mahogany, shipped at Livingston.