I took an account of stock before I turned in, and found that there were three dogs, eleven cats, seven children, five men, not including five of us, three women, and a dozen chickens, all sleeping, or trying to sleep, in the same room, under the one roof. And when I gave up attempting to sleep and wandered out into the night, I stepped on the pigs, and startled three or four calves that had been sleeping under the porch and that lunged up out of the darkness. We were always asking Jeffs why we slept in such places, instead of swinging our hammocks under the trees and camping out decently and in order, and his answer was that while there were insects enough in-doors, they were virtually an extinct species when compared to the number one would meet in the open air. I have camped in our West, where all you need is a blanket to lie upon and another to wrap around you, and a saddle for a pillow, and where, with a smouldering fire at your feet, you can sleep without thought of insects. But there is nothing green that grows in Honduras that is not saturated and alive with bugs, and all manner of things that creep and crawl and sting and bite. It transcends mere discomfort; it is an absolute curse to the country, and to every one in it, and it would be as absurd to write of Honduras without dwelling on the insects, as of the west coast of Africa without speaking of the fever. You cannot sit on the grass or on a fallen tree, or walk under an upright one or through the bushes, without hundreds of some sort of animal or other attaching themselves to your clothing or to your person. And if you get down from your mule to take a shot at something in the bushes and walk but twenty feet into them, you have to be beaten with brushes and rods when you come out again as vigorously as though you were a dusty carpet. There will be sometimes as many as a hundred insects under one leaf; and after they have once laid their claws upon you, your life is a mockery, and you feel at night as though you were sleeping in a bed with red pepper. The mules have even a harder time of it; for, as if they did not suffer enough in the day, they are in constant danger at night from vampires, which fasten themselves to the neck and suck out the blood, leaving them so weak that often when we came to saddle them in the morning they would stagger and almost fall. Sometimes the side of their head and shoulders would be wet with their own blood. I never heard of a vampire attacking a man in that country, but the fact that they are in the air does not make one sleep any the sounder. In the morning after our night with the varied collection of men and animals we put back again to the direct trail to Tegucigalpa, from which place we were still distant a seven days’ ride. II