San Pedro Sula lay in peaceful isolation in a sunny valley at the base of great mountains, and from the upper porch of our hotel, that had been built when the railroad was expected to continue on across the continent, we could see above the palms in the garden the clouds moving from one mountain-top to another, or lying packed like drifts of snow in the hollows between. We used to sit for hours on this porch in absolute idleness, watching Jeffs hurrying in and out below with infinite pity, while we listened to the palms rustling and whispering as they bent and courtesied before us, and saw the sunshine turn the mountains a light green, like dry moss, or leave half of them dark and sombre when a cloud passed in between. It was a clean, lazy little place of many clay huts, with gardens back of them filled with banana-palms and wide-reaching trees, which were one mass of brilliant crimson flowers. In the centre of the town was a grass-grown plaza where the barefooted and ragged boy-soldiers went through leisurely evolutions, and the mules and cows gazed at them from the other end. Our hotel was leased by an American woman, who was making an unappreciated fight against dirt and insects, and the height of whose ambition was to get back to Brooklyn and take in light sewing and educate her two very young daughters. Her husband had died in the interior, and his portrait hung in the dining-room of the hotel. She used to talk about him while she was waiting at dinner, and of what a well-read and able man he had been. She would grow so interested in her stories that the dinner would turn cold while she stood gazing at the picture and shaking her head at it. We became very much interested in the husband, and used to look up over our shoulders at his portrait with respectful attention, as though he were present. His widow did not like Honduranians; and though she might have made enough money to take her home, had she consented to accept them as boarders, she would only receive gringos at her hotel, which she herself swept and scrubbed when she was not cooking the dinner and making the beds. She had saved eight dollars of the sum necessary to convey her and her children home, and to educate them when they got there; and as American travellers in Honduras are few, and as most of them ask you for money to help them to God’s country, I am afraid her chance of seeing the Brooklyn Bridge is very doubtful. [Illustration: SETTING OUT FROM SAN PEDRO SULA] We contributed to her fund, and bought her a bundle of lottery tickets, which we told her were the means of making money easily; and I should like to add that she won the grand prize, and lived happily on Brooklyn Heights ever after; but when we saw the list at Panama, her numbers were not on it, and so, I fear, she is still keeping the only clean hotel in Honduras, which is something more difficult to accomplish and a much more public-spirited thing to do than to win a grand prize in a lottery.