VI 
PREFACE. 
No country on the northern half of the American 
continent has a finer climate or more beautiful and varied 
scenery, or is a more attractive field for the genuine 
traveller. Valleys rivalling the paradises of the islands 
of the Pacific; uplands not unlike the plateau of the 
Indian Neilgherries; forests as dense and luxuriant as 
those of Brazil; lakes as picturesque as those of Switzer¬ 
land ; green slopes that might have been taken from the 
Emerald Isle; glens like the Trossachs; desert wastes 
that recall the Sahara; volcanoes like iEtna; and a 
population as various as in that land whence comes the 
Indian name, — all these features make but the incom¬ 
plete outline of the Guatemaltecan picture. Then there 
is that charming freedom from conventionality which 
permits a costume for comfort rather than for fashion, 
accoutrements for convenience rather than, for show. No 
dangerous beast or savage man attempts the traveller’s 
life, no lurking danger or insidious pestilence is in his 
path. The hair-breadth escapes, more interesting to the 
reader than pleasant to the explorer, are rare here, and 
the rough places and the irritations from which no land 
on earth is wholly free, seem softened and vanishing to 
the retrospective eye. 
Old travellers know how soon the individuality of a 
country is lost when once the tide of foreign travel is 
turned through its towns or its by-ways; and when the 
ship-railway of Eads crosses the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, 
when the Northern Railroad extends through Guatemala, 
when the Transcontinental Railway traverses the plains 
of Honduras, and the Nicaraguan Canal unites the At¬ 
lantic and the Pacific, the charm will be broken, the mule- 
path and the mozo de cargo will be supplanted, and a 
journey across Central America become almost as dull as 
a journey from Chicago to Cheyenne. 
