Opposite the town are lands fertile and capable of producing fine crops to an enterprising owner. Frank and I rowed over several times, once exploring a neglected _finca_, where cane, sapotes, cassava, bananas, plantains, rose-apples, and coconuts were all jumbled together; at another time visiting a cacao-plantation farther up the stream. There is certainly room for a wise investment of capital on these lands on the eastern slope of San Gil as far as Santo Tomas. And here let me write of this port, Puerto Barrios, and the Northern Railroad, although I did not visit them until the spring of 1885. Santo Tomas is beautifully situated; but since the sad failure of the Belgian colony established there by a legislative decree of April, 1843, it has borne a bad reputation, and its inhabitants diminished to the insignificant number of a hundred and twenty-nine by the last census. Its harbor, into which no large river empties, is an exceedingly good one, and a wharf might be constructed on deep water; but the authorities, in selecting a terminus for the projected railway which is to connect Guatemala City with the Atlantic coast, and so unite the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, chose a place some three miles eastward from Santo Tomas, where they must construct a wharf some three hundred feet in length to reach twenty feet of water, and where often ships cannot lie, but must run for Santo Tomas in bad weather. Add to this that the site of the fine city of Puerto Barrios is a swamp at present uninhabitable, although laid out (on paper) in a very attractive way, with castle, theatre, hippodrome, and all the elements of a Centro-American city of the first rank. The splendid mango-trees, with their dark, dense foliage, are abundant in the old village, while here even the palms are dwarfed. [Illustration: Puerto Barrios.]