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162 as the scene of Filibuster Walker's bold exploit, the country had never been associated with my thoughts, and canals and filibusters were not in my line. I had perhaps an adumbration of centipeds and scorpions and of a people in a chronic state of revolution, which surely is not an alluring mental picture. It happened, however, that I had made preparations to go with an expedition for an extended tour of the West Indies, and was all ready to depart, when at the last moment the project was indefinitely postponed. Trunks and gripsacks were neatly packed and good-byes had been duly bidden, and here I was without any destination. In this perplexity a letter was handed me bearing an unfamiliar post-mark. Hastily tearing open the envelope, I read:

April 5, 1803.

" You have been wondering, no doubt, not to have heard from me all these years, and your surprise will be greater to hear from me out of this strange quarter of the globe. . . . Well, my boy, I've been at work, hard at work, and, as the world would say, I've prospered. . . . I am working a very valuable grant, covering one hundred square miles. The bottoms are rich in timber and the uplands abound with gold. Native help is plentiful and can be hired for a song and sixpence, and the mahogany can be floated all the way to the coast. I want a congenial associate, and don't know any one with whom I would rather share my good fortune. At any rate, since I heard, by the rarest chance, that you were on the way to the Caribbean, you would find a run over to view the country well worth your while, etc.

Here was an impulse, all that was needed so ho! and away for Nicaragua!

—The 10th of May, 1893, found us aboard a little schooner from Greytown bound for Bluefields, the capital of that singular and little-known people the Mosquito Indians.

The portion of the Caribbean littoral commonly known as the Mosquito Coast, but more accurately called the "Mosquito Reservation," is a strip of land about two hundred miles in length extending northward from the Rama River to the Rio Huesco, and backward from the sea about forty miles; the western boundary being an astronomical line along the meridian of longitude 84º 15'.

The so-called Mosquito Indians are by no means a homogeneous people. The interior river districts are inhabited by true Indians of various tribes and languages, agricultural in their habits—if such a thing as agriculture can be spoken of in this land of spontaneous vegetation and perennial summer. The coast