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202 "They do not know but what you belong here."

Slowly the day wore along, growing hotter and hotter, until at two o'clock the rooms were like a bake oven.

"This is nothing," said Longley, after hearing me complain of the heat. "It is only ninety-six degrees to-day. Sometimes it is a hundred and ten in the shade."

"I wouldn't want to live here very long," I answered. "It would take all the starch out of a fellow. I don't wonder that the natives are lazy."

"Oh, some of them are no good anyhow," said he. "They won't work, but spend their time in sleeping, smoking, and in attending cockfights and bullfights. Cockfighting, you know, is the national sport."

"And it is a wicked, cruel thing, Longley. I don't see how a man can call himself a man and put in his time looking at one rooster trying to tear another to death with steel spurs."

"It is all that you say of it, and so is bullfighting."

"I'm glad we haven't any such national sports," I went on. "Baseball and football are good enough for me."

"They laugh at baseball and call it baby's play."