d call it, all around the building, and is paved,
as is also the yard for many feet. Beyond this the land gently slopes to
a river, and still farther on a mountain rises up to limit the landscape
and prevent our greedy eyes from drinking of beauty to a more than
endurable state of intoxication.

It was blissful to lie in a hammock and watch the setting sun give here
and there a lingering farewell touch as if loath to go and leave behind
so much that was beloved, and then at the close of the short tropical
twilight to see fair Luna crown, first with a halo of approaching glory
and then with her own sweet self, the dark peak whose outlines rose
sharp and clear against the star-pierced blue of the evening sky.

It was blissful, I say, to revel in this grand pastoral poem in the full
consciousness that the transition to prose would be one of terror; to
know that in one of the big, cool, clean rooms a comfortable bed was
prepared for me, where I would lose myself in restful unconsciousness,
guarded by the saint whose figure could be clearly defined in an old
oil-painting on the wall, and which, with two others of a like kind,
were relics, doubtless, of a chapel's previous decoration.

'Twas even so, and when I awoke in the morning to find a huge vessel of
water from the river standing by a shallow tub hewn from the trunk of a
tree, while near at hand were placed all the articles necessary for body
and soul-satisfying ablutions, my perfect content knew not how to
manifest itself.

Beautiful _San Francisco_! What happiness to fill the house with twenty
chosen friends and there to dream away a month or more of idle joy!
Surely after such _dolce far niente_ days life could hold no bitterness
for which we had not, in experience, a ready antidote.

Too soon, it seemed, we were forced to leave there, for we had a long,
weary day of mountain climbing ahead of us.

"A bad road," Vincent said, and when he warned me thus I knew I could
expect the worst.

We departed through the fields again, past the barb-wire boundary line,
across the river, and up among the foot-hills, leading to the mountain
close at hand. When the topmost crest was reached I stopped for a last
look at the _Yegnare Valley_, at _San Francisco_ lying below, at _San
Morano_ farther in the distance, at the mountain looming up in the
background, beyond which lies _Tegacigalpa_, and then I turned with
strengthened spirit to the task before me.

To my surprise, at