Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. The roads were in truth much more hilly and stony than any we had yet passed, and we made in consequence but slow progress. At about twelve o'clock we reached a pretty little village where we stopped to breakfast. The posada and everything about it was remarkably clean, and the owner of it, who was the Alcalde, or magistrate of the place gave Henry another horse in exchange for the one he brought from La Union, which was a wretched animal—slow and insecure. After resting myself for an hour in the niceclean hammock we proceeded on our journey, much refreshed bj the delicious coffee and fresh eggs, two luxuries silways obtainable in the poorest houses in Central America. Mr. Squires had warned us of the mud we should have to encounter between this village and San Miguel; but it almost exceeded his description, and at one place in particular I really thought our horses would have sunk altogether. It was a wild, desolate-looking plain on the crown of a hill; myriads of locusts were flying, over it, darkening the air, and leaving a wasted country behind them, for these destructive insects eat up every green leaf they can find; they whizzed past my ears, and flapped against my face in the most disagreeable manner, while my poor horse shook his head and snorted with annoyance, and I was heartily glad when a turn in the road took us out of their line of flight, and we found ourselves in a valley, with a very tolerable road before us. We were so tired of the slow pace at which we had been travelling all day that Henry and I determined to take advantage of the comparative smoothness of the roads, and set of at a fast trot which soon left our lazy baggage mules and guides behind us. The two latter were the most disagreeable specimens of the race that we had yet encounte... --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.