Page:Narrative of an Official Visit to Guatemala.djvu/111

CH. VII.] up one of the mats to get at my writing desk, I discovered the three muleteers, who were lying stretched upon the ground, having had the precaution thus to shade themselves from the sun, which was now really beaming in all its suffocating splendour. Two out of this triumvirate were also asleep: it was a practical commentary on a well appointed commission.

But where was my servant, the shaver and bleeder from the hospital at Acapulco? I called him two or three times by his right name, Henrico, though in my imagination I always pictured him as Quixote; but he did not appear: I called again, but not very loud; for my voice reechoed so through the dead silence that prevailed that it almost startled me to hear it. There was a slight movement in the hut amongst the mules, and the Chinese came forth with nothing on him but a pair of short cotton trowsers and a night-cap. He stared like a man that had been awakened with the alarm of fire; but take him, all in all, I