fruit and fancy shell-work which you are solicited to
purchase by girls and women As you walk along,
a charming pensive-eyed seiiorita throws over your
head a necklace, at the same time saying, it is a pres-
ent, but should you let it remain you will not have
gone far before the coffee-colored beauty turns up and
desires a present in return. A fine dinner used to
be served by a female French restaurateur, a noted
cook and virago. At night, in the absence of the
moon, the town is lighted by lanterns hung out at the
doors. Contentment and happiness reign ; the women,
some of them quite beautiful, gather fruit, and make
and sell shell-work ; men lounge in shady nooks,
smoke, and sip aguardiente, and naked children suck
oranges, munch bananas, and roll in the dirt. The
fort, once effective as a means of defence, is solid and
substantial still, though it would afford little protec-
tion against a modern monitor. It is usually garri-
soned by one or two companies of ragged barefooted
soldiers with heterogenous uniforms and almost worth-
less arms. In a clear mountain stream back of the
town there is delightful bathing, but the senoritas
tliat stand on the bank, towel in hand, awaiting you,
make it an awkard position for a modest man to be
placed in. Occasionally a severe earthquake assists
time in demolishing buildings.
Fifty miles below Acapulco, on the night of the 27th of February, the steamer North America, Captain Blethen, was stranded on the beach. The passengers were all saved, and most of them had reached Aca- pulco previous to our arrival. Seven hundred dollars had been contributed for their relief by the passengers of the Tennessee, which entered the port of Acapulco on the 4th of March, bound upward. The North America was the best steamer in the Nicaragua line, and next to the Golden Gate the fastest vessel on the Pacific. As a matter of course, the captain was greatly blamed for the accident, some charging him with culpable negligence, others with ignorance of the
