There was a merchant in Tegucigalpa named Santos Soto--he is there still, I believe--and about a year ago President Vasquez told him he needed a loan of ten thousand dollars to assist him in his struggle against Bonilla; and as Soto was making sixty thousand dollars a year in the country, he suggested that he had better lend it promptly. Soto refused, and was locked in the cartel, where it was explained to him that for every day he delayed in giving the money the amount demanded of him would be increased one thousand dollars. As he still refused, he was chained to an iron ball and led out to sweep the streets in front of his shop, which extends on both sides of the principal thoroughfare of the capital. He is an old man, and the sight of the chief merchant in Tegucigalpa sweeping up the dust in front of his own block of stores had a most salutary effect upon the other merchants, who promptly loaned the sums demanded of them, taking rebates on customs dues in exchange--with one exception. This merchant owned a jewelry store, and was at the same time the English consular agent. He did not sweep the streets, nor did he contribute to the forced loan. He values in consequence his tin sign, which is not worth much as a work of art, at about ten thousand dollars. There is much that might be written of consular agents in Central America that would differ widely from the reports written by themselves and published by the State Department. The most interesting thing about them, to my mind, is the fact that none of them ever seem to represent a country which they have ever seen, and that they are always citizens of another country to which they are anxious to return. I find that after Americans, Germans make the best American consular agents, and Englishmen the best German consular agents, while French consular agents would be more useful to their countrymen if they could speak French as well as they do Spanish. Sometimes, as in the case of the consular agent at Corinto, you find a native of Italy representing both Great Britain and the United States. A whole comic opera could be written on the difficulties of a Nicaraguan acting as an English and American consul, with three British men-of-war in the harbor levying on the customs dues of his native land, and an American squadron hastening from Panama to see that their English cousins did not gather in a few islands by mistake.