Somerset passed the first sentry with safety, and we sat down on the grass by the side of the road opposite to await developments, and were distressed to observe him make directly for the kitchen, with the ambassador’s letter held firmly in his hand. So we stood up and shouted to him to go the other way, and he became embarrassed, and continued to march up and down the gravel walk with much indecision, and as if he could not make up his mind where he wanted to go, like the grenadiers in front of St. James’s Palace. It happened that his excellency was out, so Somerset left our cards and his letter, and we walked off through the green, well-kept streets and wondered at the parrots and the chained monkeys and the Anglicized little negro girls in white cotton stockings and with Sunday-school books under their arms. All the show-places of interest were closed on that day, so, after an ineffectual attempt to force our way into the jail, which we mistook for a monastery, we walked back through an avenue of cocoanut-palms to the International Hotel for dinner. [Illustration: NATIVE CONSTABULARY, BELIZE] We had agreed that as it was our first dinner on shore, it should be a long and excellent one, with several kinds of wine. The International Hotel is a large one, with four stories, and a balcony on each floor; and after wandering over the first three of these in the dark we came upon a lonely woman with three crying children, who told us with reproving firmness that in Belize the dinner-hour is at four in the afternoon, and that no one should expect a dinner at seven. We were naturally cast down at this rebuff, and even more so when her husband appeared out of the night and informed us that keeping a hotel did not pay--at least, that it did not pay him--and that he could not give us anything to drink because he had not renewed his license, and even if he had a license he would not sell us anything on Sunday. He had a touch of malaria, he said, and took a gloomy view of life in consequence, and our anxiety to dine well seemed, in contrast, unfeeling and impertinent. But we praised the beauty of the three children, and did not set him right when he mistook us for officers from the English gunboats in the harbor, and for one of these reasons he finally gave us a cold dinner by the light of a smoking lamp, and made us a present of a bottle of stout, for which he later refused any money. We would have enjoyed our dinner at Belize in spite of our disappointment had not an orderly arrived in hot search after Somerset, and borne him away to dine at Government House, where Griscom and I pictured him, as we continued eating our cold chicken and beans, dining at her majesty’s expense, with fine linen and champagne, and probably ice. Lightfoot took us back to the boat in mournful silence, and we spent the rest of the evening on the quarter-deck telling each other of the most important people with whom we had ever dined,