Copan, by bathing every day in the river and affording proof to the other half-castes that cleanliness was not necessarily followed by fever. And on the day when my numerous friends and patients came to bid me good-bye and bring me little parting presents, I felt quite proud of the success of my preaching when a woman, whose child I had been doctoring, whispered, rather shyly, as she gave me a little bundle of native cigars, "Don Alfredo, I wash my baby every day!"
As soon as the war was over we had begun to send mules and carriers to Yzabal with cargoes of paper and plaster moulds. The paper moulds, after being well dried in the sun, were given a good dressing with boiled linseed oil, and then made up into packages covered first with "scrims," a sort of loosely woven canvas, and then with an outer coat of shiny waterproof cloth. Each package was then fixed in a crate made of the long light stems of a species of Hibiscus, which we had previously cut and dried. They were unwieldy burdens, but as none of them weighed more than sixty pounds, we had no great difficulty in engaging mozos who carried them on their tacks in safety to the port. The conveyance of the plaster moulds was a more difficult matter, as there were in all about fourteen hundred pieces of various shapes and sizes, which needed the greatest care in handling and packing. Each piece was first of all wrapped in tow, which I had brought from England for the purpose, and then tied up with string in a sheet of strong brown paper. Thirty-two of these packets could, on an average, be packed into the two boxes which each mule carried. We usually managed to send off about ten cargoes at a time, with instructions that the boxes (which were those in which our stores had been brought from home) should be unpacked at the port, and returned to us empty. On his last journey but one the muleteer was told to bring back only half the empty boxes but, alas we had made a miscalculation, and when the mules returned for their last loads, we found that we had still on hand five muleloads of plaster moulds, and no boxes to pack them in.
It would have taken at least ten days to get the empty boxes back from the port, and to us they would have been days of idleness, as our camp was broken up and most of our luggage packed. So we looked about to see where we could procure ten rough boxes nearer at hand. We had already exhausted the resources of Zacapa, and now I learned to my dismay that there was no hope of buying any boards from which boxes could be made nearer than the port itself! Finally we had to search the native "milpas" for the stumps of the scented cedar trees which had been left in the ground when the forest was cleared and the plantations made: these we split up with our axes as nearly as possible into boards, and carried them into the
