The public garden especially interested me, since all the flowers (except an orange-tree) were such as I might find at home;[20] but times and seasons were sadly mixed. Pinks and gladioli, sunflower and white lily, all blossomed together. The fountain was painted blue and white,—the national colors,—and sadly disfigured the garden, which otherwise was not laid out with any taste. Our apartment in this only hotel in Sololà was completely fire-proof; walls, roof, and floor were brick or tile, and several of the floor-tiles were deeply impressed with dog-tracks (made, of course, before the kiln),—much resembling the fossil footprints in the red sandstone of the Connecticut valley. A low table, one chair, a hardwood table called a bedstead, furnished this room; and there was one door and a single window,—the latter, with its iron grating, suggesting a prison-cell. It was clean and quiet, and good enough. It does not require long travel in the tropics to teach one that the less unnecessary furniture in a house, the fewer lurking-places for cockroaches, centipedes, scorpions, snakes, and other disagreeable tenants; and comparative emptiness decidedly reduces the temperature of a room. During the night my hammock broke down; and the sympathy Frank expressed as he was half-awakened by the noise, would have been very soothing had he not fallen asleep again in the midst of it, leaving me sitting on the floor. He continued his sympathy in the morning, when the dreadful jar was almost forgotten.