“Yes, just off the end of San Lorenzo, near where the Blanco Encalada is cruising. My! Carl, but that was an anxious evening! I don’t believe I ever told you how frightened I was during the hours that we clung to the overturned cat-boat.”
“No, and I never told you. I think we kept one another’s courage up, don’t you?”
“Yes I’m sure we did.”
“Let’s leave this place,” said Harvey, “and go where the others are. It makes me homesick to look out over the bay.”
“Why?” asked the girls.
“Because the ships are all gone. It’s like going through a house where everybody is dead.”
“Ugh! what a comparison!”
Captain Saunders was talking when they came near, and they drew up chairs and listened. He had been telling those near him of a lonely six months he had passed in Nicaragua, soon after the close of the war, when he had been compelled to remain in that country as an attaché to the United States legation.
“I had not been long married,” he was saying, “and had left Mrs. Saunders and Carl in the States, for there was no steamship communication then, and the voyage to many parts of the Central American coast was made in sailing vessels. It was a very lonely life, there were few congenial spirits, and the one or two who were companionable were as homesick as I. On three occasions I was sorely tempted to go on board a steamer and sail for New York, and it is curious to note how old associations influenced me at such times.”
“How was that?” inquired Don Isaac.