The trail from Seguaca to our next resting-place led through pine forests and over layers of pine-needles that had been accumulating for years. It was a very warm, dry afternoon, and the air was filled with the odor of the pines, and when we came to one of the many mountain streams we disobeyed Jeffs and stopped to bathe in it, and let it carry us down the side of the mountain with the speed of a toboggan. We had been told that bathing at any time was extremely dangerous in Honduras, and especially so in the afternoon; but we always bathed in the afternoon, and looked forward to the half-hour spent in one of these roaring rapids as the best part of the day. Of all our recollections of Honduras, they are certainly the pleasantest. The water was almost icily cold, and fell with a rush and a heavy downpour in little water-falls, or between great crevices in the solid rocks, leaping and bubbling and flashing in the sun, or else sweeping in swift eddies in the compass of deep, shadowy pools. We used to imprison ourselves between two rocks and let a fall of water strike us from the distance of several feet on our head and shoulders, or tear past and around us, so that in five minutes the soreness and stiffness of the day’s ride were rubbed out of us as completely as though we had been massaged at a Turkish bath, and the fact that we were always bruised and black and blue when we came out could not break us of this habit. It was probably because we were new to the country that we suffered no great harm; for Jeffs, who was an old inhabitant, and who had joined us in this particular stream for the first time, came out looking twenty years older, and in an hour his teeth were chattering with chills or clinched with fever, and his pulse was jumping at one hundred and three. We were then exactly six days’ hard riding from any civilized place, and though we gave him quinine and whiskey and put him into his hammock as soon as we reached a hut, the evening is not a cheerful one to remember. It would not have been a cheerful evening under any circumstances, for we shared the hut with the largest and most varied collection of human beings, animals, and insects that I have ever seen gathered into so small a place.