All of these idlers gathered in the shade around the women who sold sweet drinks and sticks of pink-and-yellow candy. They were the public characters of the place and the centre of all the gossip of the town, and presided over their tables with great dignity in freshly ironed frocks and brilliant turbans. They were very handsome and very clean-looking, with bare arms and shoulders, and their hair always shone with cocoanut oil, and was wonderfully braided and set off with flowers stuck coquettishly over one ear. The men used to sit around them in groups on the bags of coffee waiting for export, and on the boxes of barbed wire, which seemed to be the only import. And sometimes a small boy would buy a stick of candy or command the mixture of a drink, and the woman would fuss over her carved gourds, and rinse and rub them and mix queer liquors with a whirling stick of wood that she spun between the palms of her hands. We would all watch the operation with great interest, the natives on the coffee-sacks and ourselves upon the balcony, and regard the small boy while he drank the concoction with envy. The veranda had loose planks for its floor, and gaping knot-holes through which the legs of our chairs would sink suddenly, and which we could use on those occasions when we wanted to drop penknives and pencils and water on the heads of those passing below. Our companions in idleness were the German agents of the trading-houses and young Englishmen down from the mines to shake off a touch of fever, and two Americans who were taking a phonograph through Central America. Their names were Edward Morse and Charles Brackett, and we will always remember them as the only Americans we met who were taking money out of Central America and not bringing it there to lose it. Every afternoon we all tramped a mile or two up the beach in the hot sun for the sake of a quarter of an hour of surf-bathing, which was delightful in itself, and which was rendered especially interesting by our having to share the surf with large man-eating sharks. When they came, which they were sure to do ten minutes after we had arrived, we generally gave them our share.