"I was reading this morning," said he, "of a snake of the constrictor species that was killed close to a hacienda where the writer of the narrative was stopping. It was fourteen feet long, and not unusually large of its kind. The people of the hacienda said it was fortunate that the creature had been despatched, as it would quite likely have killed one of the children; and they related many stories about babies being swallowed by these serpents.
"The same traveller, Mr. Wells, tells about a ceremony that he witnessed where a tamagasa, one of the most deadly snakes of Central America, was burned alive in the public square of a village. Two natives had found the snake basking in the sun; one threw his poncho over the reptile while the other held its head to the ground with a forked stick till its mouth could be sewed up, so that it could do no harm. The snake was about three feet long. The ceremony took place in the evening, and the village priest pronounced a malediction upon the creature before it was consigned to the flames. No remedy is known for the bite of this serpent, nor for that of the taboba, another venomous product of Central America."
"To go on with the country," said Frank, when Fred paused at the end of his snake story, "we will remark that Central America comprises five republics which are independent of each other, Costa Rica, Honduras, Guatemala, San Salvador, and Nicaragua. Down to 1823 they were colonies of Spain; in that year they formed themselves into a federal republic of States and declared their independence. They continued thus until 1839, when they dissolved their federation and became independent of each other. Since then they have united again on two or three occasions, but have not remained so for any length of time. Several attempts at a federation (one of them in 1888), have resulted in nothing. Now and then the republics have wars among themselves, but the rest of the world goes on as if nothing had happened, as the moon did when the dog barked at it.
"The governments of the States of Central America are republican in form, modified by revolution and assassination; happily these modifications are not applied as frequently nowadays as in former times, but they are by no means unknown. To show how revolutions are started and how they sometimes turn out, let us take a page from the history of Costa Rica."
CENTRAL AMERICAN LODGINGS.
Thereupon Frank read from "The Capitals of Spanish America" the account of how the Government of that republic was overthrown, and a new one established in 1871. Substantially it was as follows:
The Congress of Costa Rica had caused a railway to be surveyed from ocean to ocean across the State. It was necessary to seek foreign aid for the construction of the line, and the two banking houses at San José, the capital city, were rivals for the appointment of Government agent to negotiate the loan.
The defeated banker was, like his rival, an Englishman (married to a Costa Rican lady), and the capital of his bank was English. In revenge, and with a view to business, he determined to overthrow the Government and set up one of his own.