The only other industry of Santa Rosa is the raising of tobacco and the making of a tolerably good cigar, famed throughout Honduras and selling here twenty for a real. Every hut and almost every shop is a cigar factory. The town is four thousand feet above sea-level, giving it a delightful, lazy, satisfied-with-life-just-as-it-is air that partly makes up for its ignorance, disease, and unmorality. The population is largely Indian, unwashed since birth, and with huge hoof-like bare feet devoid of sensation. There is also considerable Spanish blood, generally adulterated, its possessors sometimes shod and wearing nearly white cotton suits and square white straw hats. In intelligence the entire place resembles children without a child's power of imitation. Except for the snow-white church, the town is entirely one-story, with tile roofs, a ragged flowery plaza, and straight streets, sometimes cobbled, that run off down hill, for the place is built on a meadowy knoll with a fine vista of hills and surrounded by an immensely rich land that would grow almost anything in abundance with a minimum of cultivation.
The one way of getting an early start in Honduras is to make your purchases the night before and eat them raw in the morning. Christmas day had barely dawned, therefore, when I began losing my way among the undulating white rock paths beyond Santa Rosa. Such a country brings home to man his helplessness and unimportance before untamed nature. I wished to be in Tegucigalpa, two hundred miles away, within five days; yet all the wealth of Croesus could not have brought me there in that time. As it was, I had broken the mule-back record, and many is the animal that succumbs to the up and down trails of Honduras. This one might, were such triteness permissible, have been most succinctly characterized by a well-known description of war. It was rougher than any stone-quarry pitched at impossible angles, and the attraction of gravity for my burden passed belief. To this I had been forced to add not merely a roll of silver reales but my Christmas dinner, built up about the nucleus of a can of what announced itself outwardly as pork and beans. Talgua, at eleven, did not seem the fitting scene for so solemn a ceremony, and I hobbled on, first over a tumble-down stone bridge, then by a hammock-bridge to which one climbed high above the river by a notched stick and of which two thirds of the cross-slats were missing, while the rest cracked or broke under the 185 pounds to which I subjected them.