Just around the corner--as everything is in this miniature capital--the American Legation delivered the accumulated mail of a month, and the pair of real shoes I had had the happy thought of sending to myself here months before. This bit of foresight saved me from hobbling on to the coast barefoot. I had arrived just in time to attend one of Tegucigalpa's gala events, the inspection of her newly reformed police force. "It is set for three," said the legation secretary, "so come around about three-thirty." Just around another corner we entered toward four the large dusty patio of a one-story building of mud blocks, against the adobe wall of which were lined up something over a hundred half-frightened, half-proud Honduranean Indians in brand new, dark-blue uniforms and caps, made in Germany, and armed with black night-sticks and large revolvers half-hidden in immense holsters. We took the places of honor reserved for us at a bench and table under the patio veranda beside the chief of police, an American soldier of fortune named Lee Christmas. He was a man nearing fifty, totally devoid of all the embroidery of life, golden toothed and graying at the temples, but still hardy and of youthful vigor, of the dress and manner of a well-paid American mechanic, who sat chewing his black cigar as complacently as if he were still at his throttle on the railroad of Guatemala. Following the latest revolution he had reorganized what, to use his own words, had been "a bunch of barefooted apes in faded-blue cotton rags" into the solemn military company that was now to suffer its first formal inspection. The native secretary, standing a bit tremulously in the edge of the shade, called from the list in his hand first the name of Christmas himself, then that of the first assistant, and his own, he himself answering "present" for each of these. Next were the commanders, clerks, under-secretaries, and the like in civilian garb, each, as his name was pronounced, marching past us hat in hand and bowing profoundly. Last came the policemen in uniform. As the secretary read his title and first name, each self-conscious Indian stepped stiffly forth from the ranks, throwing a foot, heavy with the unaccustomed shoe, high in the air and pounding the earth in the new military style taught him by a willowy young native in civilian dress who leaned haughtily on his cane watching every movement, made a sharp-cornered journey about the sun-flooded yard and bringing up more or less in front of his dreaded chief, gave a half turn, raised the right leg to the horizontal with the grace of an aged ballet dancer long since the victim of rheumatism, brought it down against the left like the closing of a heavy trapdoor, saluted with his night-stick and huskily called out his own last name, which Christmas checked off on the list before him without breaking the thread of the particular anecdote with which he chanced at that moment to be entertaining us.