It was quite in keeping, also, that the advertisements on the boardings should announce and give equal prominence to a “Sunday-school treat” and a boxing-match between men of H.M.S. _Pelican_, and that the officers of that man-of-war should be playing cricket with a local eleven under the full tropical sun, and that the chairs in the Council-room and Government House should be of heavy leather stamped V.R., with a crown above the initials. An American official in as hot a climate, being more adaptable, would have had bamboo chairs with large, open-work backs, or would have even supplied the council with rocking-chairs. Lightfoot agreed to take us ashore at a quarter of a dollar apiece. He had a large open sail-boat, and everybody called him Lightfoot and seemed to know him intimately, so we called him Lightfoot too. He was very black, and light-hearted at least, and spoke English with the soft, hesitating gentleness that marks the speech of all these natives. It was Sunday on land, and Sunday in an English colony is observed exactly as it should be, and so the natives were in heavily starched white clothes, and were all apparently going somewhere to church in rigid rows of five or six. But there were some black soldiers of the West India Regiment in smart Zouave uniforms and turbans that furnished us with local color, and we pursued one of them for some time admiringly, until he become nervous and beat a retreat to the barracks. [Illustration: SIR ALFRED MOLONEY (Central Figure)] Somerset had a letter from his ambassador in Washington to Sir Alfred Moloney, K.C.M.G., the governor of British Honduras, and as we hoped it would get us all an invitation to dinner, we urged him to present it at once. Four days of the ship’s steward’s bountiful dinners, served at four o’clock in the afternoon, had made us anxious for a change both in the hour and the diet. The governor’s house at Belize is a very large building, fronting the bay, with one of the finest views from and most refreshing breezes on its veranda that a man could hope to find on a warm day, and there is a proud and haughty sentry at each corner of the grounds and at the main entrance. A fine view of blue waters beyond a green turf terrace covered with cannon and lawn-tennis courts, and four sentries marching up and down in the hot sun, ought to make any man, so it seems to me, content to sit on his porch in the shade and feel glad that he is a governor.