made of baked clay, and you seldom see any cooking utensils or dishes that have not been manufactured from the trees near the house or the earth beneath it. The water for drinking and cooking is kept in round jars of red clay, which stand in rings of twisted twigs to keep them upright, and the drinking-vessels are the halves of gourds, and the ladles are whole gourds, with the branch on which they grew still adhering to them, to serve as a handle. The furnishing of the house shows the same dependence upon nature; the beds are either grass hammocks or the rawhide that I have described, and there are no chairs and few benches, the people preferring apparently to eat sitting on their haunches to taking the trouble necessary to make a chair. Everything they eat, of which there is very little variety, grows just beyond the cleared place around the hut, and can be had at the cost of the little energy necessary to bring it in-doors. When a kid or a pig or a steer is killed, the owner goes out to the nearest peak and blows a blast on a cow’s horn, and those within hearing who wish fresh meat hurry across the mountain to purchase it. As there is no ice from one end of Honduras to the other, meat has to be eaten the day it is killed. This is not the life of the Honduranians who live in the large towns or so-called cities, where there are varying approaches to the comfort of civilized countries, but of the country people with whom we had chiefly to do. It is as near an approach to the condition of primitive man as one can find on this continent. But bare and poor as are the houses, which are bare not because the people are poor, but because they are indolent, there is almost invariably some corner of the hut set aside and ornamented as an altar, or some part of the wall covered with pictures of a religious meaning. When they have no table, the people use a shelf or the stump of a tree upon which to place emblematic figures, which are almost always china dolls, with no original religious significance, but which they have dressed in little scraps of tinsel and silk, and which they have surrounded with sardine-tins and empty bottles and pictures from the lids of cigar-boxes. Everything that has color is cherished, and every traveller who passes adds unconsciously to their stock of ornaments in the wrappings of the boxes which he casts away behind him. Sometimes the pictures they use for ornamentation are not half so odd as the fact that they ever should have reached such a wilderness. We were frequently startled by the sight of colored lithographs of theatrical stars, advertising the fact that they were playing under the direction of such and such a manager, and patent-medicine advertisements and wood-cuts from illustrated papers, some of them twenty and thirty years old, which were pinned to the mud walls and reverenced as gravely as though they had been pictures of the Holy Family by a Raphael or a Murillo.