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66 with the Spanish-speaking Yankee, and all goes merry as the presidential reception the night before.

The road that was said to be so fearfully and wonderfully not made, is broad and smooth the first ten miles. It winds down a steep hill for two or three miles. The torrid January sun pours its heat fiercely on the coach. The driver and his boy are in their shirt-sleeves, and the passengers wish they were. The drivers have skin and hair-covered overpants for the coming Cumbres and midnight. Cottages line the roadside, half hidden amidst huge



banana and coffee bushes, tall mango-trees, and flowers of every hue. The cottages are chiefly of cane, with sides not over four feet, and roofs rising ten to twenty feet, some even taller, giving them much coolness and airiness, the great desiderata. Brown women are busy at their household tasks, and brown children lie, like beetles, lazily in the shade or sun. The parrot screams and jabbers, and picks its handsome coat of its unhandsome parasites, poised on perches at times, but not always put in cages. Nature