152 The Naturalist in Nicaragua 
Our beasts were tired out with the rough travelling, and 
we moved along slowly. About five o’clock we came in 
sight of the rock of Cuapo, an isolated perpendicular cliff 
rising about 300 feet above the top of a hill that it crowns. 
After descending a long, steep range, we reached, near dusk, 
a small hut, called Tablason, and here we determined to pass 
the night, although the accommodation was about the 
scantiest possible. A man and his wife, six children, and a 
woman to grind the maize for tortillas, lived in the hut. The 
greatest portion of it was quite open at the sides, without 
even a fence to keep out the pigs. At one end a place about 
ten feet square was partitioned off from the rest, and sur- 
rounded with mud-walls, and in this the whole family slept. 
Both the people and the house were very dirty. The re- 
mains of a broken chair was the only furniture, excepting 
the rough bedsteads made by inserting four sticks into the 
ground, on which were laid two long poles, kept apart by 
two shorter ones at the end, over which rude frame a dry 
hide was stretched. I was offered one of these couches for 
the night, and accepted it; though if it had not been for the 
rain I would rather have slept outside, but all around was 
sloppy and wet; night had set in; our mules and horse were 
tired; we ourselves were fatigued, and there was no other 
shelter within several miles. They had no food to sell us, 
and appeared to have nothing for themselves, excepting a 
few tortillas and a little home-made cheese. We opened out 
some of our preserved meats. Whilst I was eating, the 
whole family crowded around me, apparently never having 
seen any one eat with a fork before. Fortunately we had 
brought candles with us, or we should have been in darkness, 
for they had none; nor did they appear to use them, as they 
had no candlesticks, and the children and our host himself 
took it by turns to hold our lights. All wore ragged, dirty 
cotton clothes, that only half-covered them. They had four 
cows, and pigs, dogs, and poultry. The land around was 
fertile; they might take as much of it as they liked to 
cultivate, and, with a little trouble, might have grown almost 
anything; but the blight of Central America—the curse of 
idleness, was upon them, and they were content to live on in 
squalid poverty rather than work. 
We were so tired that, notwithstanding our miserable and 
