His face looked more yellow and flabby, and his black eyes more shifty than ever. He bowed, and I bowed, and then he waved his secretary at me—a little chap in another frock-coat and silk hat who followed him. The little chap’s patent-leather boots were giving him trouble, and he came along the quarterdeck on his toes, like a cat walking along a wall covered with broken glass. Fortunately he could speak a little English, and whilst his boss was mopping his forehead, he said, ’Presidente de Costa thank you for coming,’ almost breaking himself in half, he bowed so low. Four or five more chaps came along, every one of them with an enormous black and green rosette in his coat. These were soldiers—two of them niggers—and very mild-looking soldiers they were, just the sort you’d imagine would hang about at headquarters, and get soft jobs where there weren’t many bullets flying round. However, I was wrong in thinking so. They spent half an hour on board, explaining that the Dictator’s flag (Canilla’s) flew nowhere throughout the province of Leon, except over El Castellar—the fort which had had the accident two hours before—and of course swore that they were now strong enough to march on Santa Cruz itself, and intended to do so very shortly. The upshot was that they demanded official recognition from the Foreign Powers. That was the whole matter; they wanted recognition so that they could buy warlike supplies from abroad openly, for of course at the present time no Foreign Power would allow its subjects to assist them. ’We have this policy foreign, we encourage the merchants, and we permit all trade very much of the foreign peoples, and very much the _Inglesas_ also. Always they shall be first now that the noble _Inglese_ ship of war visit San Fernando—the first ship to come,’ the little secretary told me. He looked so diminutive and so important, and was evidently in such discomfort with his boots and his tight frock-coat, that I had to screw my eyeglass into my eye till it pained—I wanted to laugh so much. Not a word did they say about the little cruiser which was lying close by, waiting for a chance to pot them on their way ashore, or about the shell-marks on every wall. Not much, for that would have drawn attention to the perfectly obvious fact that they could do nothing till they had command of the sea, and also to the fact that they were absolutely without any artillery. A couple of well-fought six-pounder guns, if they’d had them, would have been quite sufficient to drive off the wretched little cruiser-gunboat kind of affair. Poor chaps! you couldn’t help seeing that they were terribly in earnest, but I couldn’t possibly give them any hopes of their Provisional Government being recognised, the most I could do was to forward their demand by ’wireless’ to the _Hercules_ at Princes’ Town for her to cable home. I saw them over the side, and interrupted the brothers Wilson yarning at the bottom of the gangway.