There was but one cool spot in Amapala; it was a point of land that the inhabitants had rather tactlessly selected as a dumping-ground for the refuse of the town, and which was only visited by pigs and buzzards. This point of land ran out into the bay, and there had once been an attempt made to turn it into a public park, of which nothing now remains but a statue to Morazan, the Liberator of Honduras. The statue stood on a pedestal of four broad steps, surrounded by an iron railing, the gates of which had fallen from their hinges, and lay scattered over the piles of dust and débris under which the park is buried. At each corner of the railing there were beautiful macaws which had once been painted in brilliant reds and greens and yellows, and which we tried to carry off one night, until we found that they also were made of iron. We would have preferred the statue of Morazan as a souvenir, but that we doubted its identity. Morazan was a smooth-faced man with a bushy head of hair, and this statue showed him with long side-whiskers and a bald head, and in the uniform of an English admiral. It was probably the rejected work of some English sculptor, and had been obtained, no doubt, at a moderate price, and as very few remember Morazan to-day it answers its purpose excellently well. We became very much attached to it, and used to burn incense to it in the form of many Honduranian cigars, which sell at two cents apiece. When night came on, and the billiard-room had grown so hot that the cues slipped in our hands, and the tantalizing sight of an American ice-cooler, which had never held ice since it left San Francisco, had driven us out into the night, we would group ourselves at the base of this statue to Morazan, and throw rocks at the buzzards and pigs, and let the only breeze that dares to pass over Amapala bring our temperature down to normal. We should have plotted a revolution by rights, for the scene was set for such a purpose, and no one in the town accounted in any other way for our climbing the broken iron railing nightly, and remaining on the steps of the pedestal until two the next morning. Amapala, I suppose, was used to heat, and could sleep with the thermometer at ninety, and did not mind the pigs or the buzzards, and if we did plot to convert Honduras into a monarchy and make Somerset king, no one heard us but the English edition of Morazan smiling blandly down upon us like a floor-walker at the Army and Navy Stores, with his hand on his heart and an occasional buzzard soaring like Poe’s raven above his marble forehead. The moonlight turned him into a figure of snow, and the great palms above bent and waved and shivered unceasingly, and the sea beat on the rocks at our feet.