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It was earth-floored, with a few homemade chairs, and a bed with board floor. Though barely four feet wide, this was suggested as the resting-place of all three of us after a supper of jet-black coffee, native bread, and cheese. Dakin and I found it more than crowded, even after Ems had spread a petate, or grass-mat, on the ground.
In particular he had made the acquaintance of James Dow, with whose knowing simplicity he was greatly taken. On the last day but one of his intended stay, as he went to make his daily inquiry, he dropped in to see James Dow in the "harled hypocrite." James had come in from his work, and was sitting alone on a bench by the table, in a corner of the earth-floored kitchen.
The small, earth-floored room was dry and warm, and smelt pleasantly of resinous wood. They did not light the lamp, for although it was dark the red glow of the fire flickered about the walls. Charnock felt a comforting sensation of bodily ease as he lounged in his chair, and when he had smoked a pipe told Festing about his encounter with Wilkinson.
A hundred feet length by twenty-five breadth, of earth-floored, clapboard-roofed, tumbling shed, rudely walled with cypress split boards, pieux, planted endwise in the earth, like palisades, a hand-breadth space between every two, and sunlight and fresh air and the gleams of green fields coming in; the scores of little tobacco-presses that had stood in ranks on the hard earth floor, the great sapling levers, and the festoons of curing tobacco that had hung from the joists overhead, all removed, only the odor left; bold gaps here and there in the pieux, made by that mild influence which the restless call decay, and serving for windows and doors; the eastern end swept clean and occupied by a few benches and five or six desks, strong, home-made, sixty-four pounders.
They found the shepherd, the shepherdess and four little shepherds eating their evening polenta in an earth-floored room, with half a dozen chickens and the family pig gathered about them in an expectant group. They rose politely and invited the travellers to enter. It was an event in their simple lives when foreigners presented themselves at the door.
Comayagua by day was a lazy, silent place, chiefly barefoot, the few possessors of shoes being gaudily dressed young men whose homes were earth-floored huts. The place had the familiar Central American air of trying to live with the least possible exertion; its people were a mongrel breed running all the gamut from black to near-white.
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