General Barrios, the young President of Guatemala, has some very smart soldiers at the capital, and dresses them in German uniforms, which is a compliment he pays to the young German emperor, for whom he has a great admiration; but his discipline does not extend so far as the Caribbean Sea. [Illustration: THE GUATEMALLECAN ARMY AT LIVINGSTON] The river Dulce goes in from Livingston, and we were told it was one of the things in Central America we ought to see, as its palisades were more beautiful than those of the Rhine. The man who told us this said he spoke from hearsay, and that he had never been on the Rhine, but that he knew a gentleman who had. You can well believe that it is very beautiful from what you can see of its mouth, where it flows into the Caribbean between great dark banks as high as the palisades opposite Dobbs Ferry, and covered with thick, impenetrable green. [Illustration: BARRACKS AT PORT BARRIOS] Port Barrios, to which one comes in a few hours, is at one end of a railroad, and surrounded by all the desecration that such an improvement on nature implies, in the form of zinc depots, piles of railroad-ties, and rusty locomotives. The town consists of a single row of native huts along the coast, terminating in a hospital. Every house is papered throughout with copies of the New York _Police Gazette_, which must give the Guatemallecan a lurid light on the habits and virtues of his cousins in North America. Most of our passengers left the ship here, and we met them, while she was taking on bananas, wandering about the place with blank faces, or smiling grimly at the fate which condemned them and their blue-prints and transits to a place where all nature was beautiful and only civilized man was discontented. We lay at Barrios until late at night, wandering round the deserted decks, or watching the sharks sliding through the phosphorus and the lights burning in the huts along the shore. At midnight we weighed anchor, and in the morning steamed into Puerto Cortez, the chief port of Spanish Honduras, where the first part of our journey ended, and where we exchanged the ship’s deck for the Mexican saddle, and hardtack for tortillas. THE EXILED LOTTERY TWO years ago, while I was passing through Texas, I asked a young man in the smoking-car if he happened to know where I could find the United States troops, who were at that time riding somewhere along the borders of Texas and Mexico, and engaged in suppressing the so-called Garza revolution.