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188 refreshing bath and a good luncheon awaiting me, and a boat ready to take me off to the vessel. Police orderlies were sent off at once to help Gorgonio and the carriers, who luckily came in sight just as the steamer was blowing her whistle, and I carried off my luggage with me in triumph, but it was a close shave.

The journey from the Cayo to Belize by the river presents no features of interest; the scenery is monotonous and the rapids are not dangerous. Although the river is navigable for canoes and pit-pans at almost all times of the year, and supplies can thus be carried in small quantities to the mahogany-cutters and other settlers on its banks, a more satisfactory highway must be established if the colony is to advance and prosper. There would be no great difficulty in constructing a light railway from Belize to the Cayo, and I have shown, in the account of my excursion into the great Southern Pine Ridge, that a considerable elevation in an open and well-watered country could easily be reached from the Cayo by a road which could be cheaply made, and there can be no doubt that a sanatorium in such a situation would be of inestimable value to residents in the colony. It cannot be contended that Belize could ever become a pleasant place of residence; the town is commonly said to be built on a foundation of sand and mahogany chips, and the saying is almost true. A shallow sea lies in front of it, and at the back it is cut off from the more solid earth by a belt of half-drained mangrove-swamps; the streets are bordered by broad ditches or canals and the ubiquitous cat-fish is the principal scavenger, and in truth no more generally approved sanitary arrangements are possible. Yet with all these disadvantages the town is well ordered, clean, and healthy and although it has been from time to time visited by the terrible scourge of yellow fever, this can generally be traced to some indiscretion on the part of the inhabitants, such as the recent attempt to deepen the foreshore. Creole negroes form the bulk of the population, and next in number are the so-called Caribs, who have already been mentioned in connection with Livingston. In British Honduras they have come under the influence of the Jesuit Missions, and I believe that the whole race now profess some sort of Christianity, although it is closely mixed with much of their old heathen superstition; they still make periodic excursions to the depths of the forests, there to celebrate certain rites on which none but a Carib's eye is allowed to gaze. They are generally polygamists, and when a man has built a house and cleared sufficient ground for a plantation he leaves a wife in charge to look after its cultivation, considering himself free to visit his other wives whom he has similarly established on other parts of the coast, and to give his attention to fishing and canoe-building and other forms of man's work. Their beautifully-shaped