Page:The Romance of Isabel, Lady Burton.djvu/301

269 cottage at home, with fare to match. It is as hot as the lower regions; and if one could take off one's flesh and sit in one's bones, one would be too glad. The very sea-breeze dries you up, and the vermin numbers about twenty species. The flies of various kinds, mosquitoes, sand-flies, and borruchutes, are at you day and night; and if you jump up in the night, it is only to squash beetles. A woman here had a snake round her leg yesterday. Behind the house and up to the first range of mountains is one vast mangrove swamp, full of fevers and vermin. I will not sleep in the beds about in strange houses (there is so much leprosy in the country), and so I always carry my hammock with me, and sling it. Last night it blew so hard that Chico and I had to get up and nail all the old things they call windows. I thought the old shanty was going to be carried away. I must tell you this is our sanatorium or fashionable watering-place here.

"I have had another bad boil since I wrote to you. We have had a Brazilian friend of Richard's lodging with us, who kept saying, 'If you ride with that boil, in a few days you will fall down dead'; or, 'Oh! don't leave that jigger in your foot; in a week it will have to be cut off.' Such was his mania; and he used to go to bed all tied up with towels and things for fear his ears should catch cold. He was quite a young man too!

"You know I have often told you that people here think me shockingly independent because I ride with Chico behind me. So what do you think I did the other