6 CHAGKES — HOTEL. Book I. 
them was the Irving House — the principal " hotel" of the 
place. At New York I had seen- it advertised and recom- 
mended as a superior establishment, " in whose spacious 
halls the traveller was sure to find the comforts and com- 
modities of civilization as it exists in the temperate zone, 
combined with all the luxuries of the tropics." It was a 
large barn-like framehouse of two stories, each of them form- 
ing one single undivided room. In the lower story a 
hundred or more travellers, sitting on four long benches 
of rough boards on both sides of two long tables of the 
same material, were treated with salt pork and dried beans, 
while in the upper room several hundred persons, sick with 
fever, were either shaking from frost or burning in the 
paroxysm of heat, and those who were able to keep up were 
sitting on their boxes and trunks in order to secure them 
from being removed by the numerous thieves and robbers 
who at that time infested this dangerous highway of travel- 
ling adventurers. Between the mud-holes and fetid water- 
pools of the street in front of the houses stood gambling- 
tables surrounded by dirty ruffians, and here and there 
the door of a liquor-shop was left open, and groups of 
bearded and long-haired, unwashed and uncombed, pale- 
faced and hollow-eyed men were seen, some of them 
cautiously holding their hands over their pockets, heavily 
loaded with the proceeds of a mining season in California, 
and too heavily altogether for the unsolid condition of their 
ragged apparel. 
None of the foreign residents of Chagres had thought of 
cultivating the smallest piece of land, or even of making 
the natural productions of the neighbourhood available 
to the daily wants of life. For the two or three cows 
which were kept here, the food was brought from the 
United States, and so was the fuel for the daily uses of 
