CHAPTER XIII

Summary

On Tuesday, the seventeenth of December, I set out on an excursion to La Antigua Guatimala and the Pacific Ocean. I was accompanied by a young man who lived opposite, and wished to ascend the Volcano de Agua. I had discharged Augustin, and with great difficulty had procured a man who knew the route. Romaldi had but one fault: he was married; like some other married men, he had a fancy for roving; but his wife set her face against this propensity; she said that I was going to El Mar, the sea, and might carry him off, and she would never see him again, and the affectionate woman wept at the bare idea; but upon my paying the money into her hands before going, she consented. My only luggage was a hammock and pair of sheets, which Romaldi carried on his mule, and each had a pair of alforgas. At the gate we met Don José Vidaury, whom I had first seen in the president's chair of the Constituent Assembly, and who was going to visit his hacienda at the Antigua. Though it was only five or six hours' distant, Seňor Vidaury, being a very heavy man, had two led horses, one of which he insisted on my mounting; and when I expressed my admiration of the animal, he told me, in the usual phrase of Spanish courtesy, that the horse was mine. It was done in the same spirit in which a Frenchman, who had been entertained hospitably in a country house in England, offered himself to seven of the daughters, merely for the compliment.