British Honduras was formerly owned by Spain, as was all of Central America, and was, on account of its bays and islands, a picturesque refuge for English and other pirates. In the seventeenth century English logwood-cutters visited the place and obtained a footing, which has been extended since by concessions and by conquest, so that the place is now a British dependency. It forms a little slice of land between Yucatan and Guatemala, one hundred and seventy-four miles in its greatest length, and running sixty-eight miles inland. Belize is a pretty village of six thousand people, living in low, broad-roofed bungalows, lying white and cool-looking in the border of waving cocoanut-trees and tall, graceful palms. It was not necessary to tell us that Belize would be the last civilized city we should see until we reached the capital of Spanish Honduras. A British colony is always civilized; it is always the same, no matter in what latitude it may be, and it is always distinctly British. Every one knows that an Englishman takes his atmosphere with him wherever he goes, but the truth of it never impressed me so much as it did at Belize. There were not more than two hundred English men and women in the place, and yet, in the two halves of two days that I was there I seemed to see everything characteristic of an Englishman in his native land. There were a few concessions made to the country and to the huge native population, who are British subjects themselves; but the colony, in spite of its surroundings, was just as individually English as is the shilling that the ship’s steward pulls out of his pocket with a handful of the queer coin that he has picked up at the ports of a half-dozen Spanish republics. They may be of all sizes and designs, and of varying degrees of a value, or the lack of it, which changes from day to day, but the English shilling, with the queen’s profile on one side and its simple “one shilling” on the other, is worth just as much at that moment and at that distance from home as it would be were you handing it to a hansom-cab driver in Piccadilly. And we were not at all surprised to find that the black native police wore the familiar blue-and-white-striped cuff of the London bobby, and the district-attorney a mortar-board cap and gown, and the colonial bishop gaiters and an apron. [Illustration: GOVERNMENT HOUSE, BELIZE]