Even in the larger towns and so-called cities we slept in private houses, and on the solitary occasion when we were directed to a hotel we found a bare room with a pile of canvas cots heaped in one corner, to which we were told to help ourselves. There was a real hotel, and a very bad one, at the capital, where we fared much worse than we had often done in the interior; but with these two exceptions we were dependent for shelter during our entire trip across Honduras upon the people of the country. Sometimes they sent us to sleep in the town-hall, which was a large hut with a mud floor, and furnished with a blackboard and a row of-benches, and sometimes with stocks for prisoners; for it served as a school or prison or hotel, according to the needs of the occasion. We were equally dependent upon the natives for our food. We carried breakfast bacon and condensed milk and sardines and bread with us, and to these we were generally able to add, at least once a day, coffee and eggs and beans. The national bread is the tortilla. It is made of cornmeal, patted into the shape of a buckwheat cake between the palms of the hands, and then baked. They were generally given to us cold, in a huge pile, and were burned on both sides, but untouched by heat in the centre. The coffee was always excellent, as it should have been, for the Honduranian coffee is as fine as any grown in Central America, and we never had too much of it; but of eggs and black beans there was no end. The black-bean habit in Honduras is very general; they gave them to us three times a day, sometimes cold and sometimes hot, sometimes with bacon and sometimes alone. They were frequently served to us in the shape of sandwiches between tortillas, and again in the form of pudding with chopped-up goat’s meat. At first, and when they were served hot, I used to think them delicious. That seems very long ago now. When I was at Johnstown at the time of the flood, there was a soda cracker, with jam inside, which was served out to the correspondents in place of bread; and even now, if it became a question of my having to subsist on those crackers, and the black beans of Central America, or starve, I am sure I should starve, and by preference.