About January 1, 1895, Richard accompanied by his friends Somers Somerset and Lloyd C. Griscom, afterward our minister to Tokio and ambassador to Brazil and Italy, started out on a leisurely trip of South and Central America. With no very definite itinerary, they sailed from New Orleans, bent on having a good time, and as many adventures as possible, which Richard was to describe in a series of articles. These appeared later on in a volume entitled "Three Gringos in Venezuela."

January, 1895.
DEAR FAM:

On board Breakwater at anchor. You will be pleased to hear that I am writing this in a fine state of perspiration in spite of the fact that I have light weight flannels, no underclothes and all the windows open. It is going to storm and then it will be cooler. We have had a bully time so far although the tough time is still to come, that will be going from Puerto Cortez to Tegucigalpa. At Belize the Governor treated us charmingly and gave us orderlies and launches and lunches and advice and me a fine subject for a short story. For nothing has struck me as so sad lately as did Sir Anthony Moloney K. C. M. G. watching us go off laughing and joking in his gilded barge to wherever we pleased and leaving him standing alone on his lawn with some papers to sign and then a dinner tete-a-tete with his Secretary and so on to the end of his life. It was pathetic to hear him listen to all the gossip from the outside world and to see how we pleased him when we told him we were getting more bald than he was and that he would make a fine appearance in the Row at his present weight. He had not heard of Trilby!!

We struck a beautiful place today called Livingston where we went ashore and photographed the army in which there was no boy older than eighteen and most of them under ten. It was quite like Africa, the homes were all thatched and the children all naked and the women mostly so. We took lots of photographs and got on most excellently with the natives who thought we were as funny as we thought them. Almost every place we go word has been sent ahead and agents and consuls and custom house chaps come out to meet me and ask what they can do. This is very good and keeps Griscom and Somerset in a proper frame of awe. But seriously I could not ask for better companions, they are both enormously well informed and polite and full of fun. The night the Governor asked Somers to dinner and did not ask us we waited up for him and then hung him out over the side of the boat above the sharks until he swore he would never go away from us again. Griscom is more aggravatingly leisurely but he has a most audacious humor and talks to the natives in a way that fills them with pleasure but which nearly makes Somers and I expose the whole party by laughing. Today we lie here taking in banannas and tomorrow I will see Conrad, Conrad, Conrad!! Send this to the Consul. Lots of love. DICK.

SAN PEDRO--SULA--February, 1895.
MY DEAR FAMILY:

The afternoon of the day we were in Puerto Cortez the man of war Atlanta steamed into the little harbor and we all cheered and the lottery people ran up the American flag. Then I and the others went out to her as fast as we could be rowed and I went over the side and the surprise of the officers was very great. They called Somers and Griscom to come up and we spent the day there. They were a much younger and more amusing lot of fellows than those on the Minneapolis and treated us most kindly. It was a beautiful boat and each of us confessed to feeling quite tempted to go back again to civilization after one day on her. Their boat had touched at Tangier and so they claimed that she was the one meant in the Exiles. They told me that the guide Isaac Cohen whom I mentioned in Harper's Weekly carries it around as an advertisement and wanted to ship with them as cabin boy. We left the next day on the railroad and the boys finding that two negroes sat on the cowcatcher to throw sand on the rails in slippery places bribed them for their places and I sat on the sand box. I never took a more beautiful drive. We did not go faster than an ordinary horse car but still it was exciting and the views and vistas wonderful. Sometimes we went for a half mile under arches of cocoanut palms and a straight broad leafed palm called the manaca that rises in separate leaves sixty feet from the ground. Imagine a palm such as we put in pots at weddings and teas as high as Holy Trinity Church and hundreds and hundreds of them. The country is very like Cuba but more luxuriant in every way. There are some trees with marble like trunks and great branches covered with oriole nests and a hundred orioles flying in and out of them or else plastered with orchids. If Billy Furness were to see in what abundance they grew he would be quite mad. It is a great pity he did not come with us. This little town is the terminus of the railroad and we have been here four days while Jeffs the American Colonel in the Hondurean Army is getting our outfit. It has been very pleasant and we are in no hurry which is a good thing for us. It is a most exciting country and as despotic as all uncivilized and unstable governments must be. But we have called on the Governor of the district with Jeffs and he gave us a very fine letter to all civil and unmilitary authorities in the district calling on them to aid and protect us in every way. I am getting awfully good material for my novel and for half a dozen stories to boot only I am surprised to find how true my novel was to what really exists here. About ten years ago ---- disappeared, having as I thought drunk himself to death. He came up to me here on my arrival with a lot of waybills in his hand and I learned that he had been employed in this hole in the ground by a railroad for two years. I remembered meeting him at Newport when I was still at Lehigh, and last night he asked me to dinner and told me what he had been doing which included everything from acting in South America to blacking boots in Australia. His boss was a Pittsburgh engineer who is apparently licking him into shape and who told me to tell his father that he had stopped drinking absolutely. His colored "missus" sat with us at the table and played with a beetle during the three hours I stayed there during which time he asked me about ---- who he said had ruined him. He told me of how ---- had done and said this, and the contrast to the thatched roof and the mud floor and the Scotch American engineer and the mulatto girl was rather striking. I never had more luck in any trip than I have had on this one and the luck of R. H. D. of which I was fond of boasting seems to hold good. That man of war, for instance, was the only American one that had touched at Puerto Cortez in TEN years and it came the day we did and left the day we did. We saw a big lithograph of Eddie Sothern in a palm hut here so we went before a notary and swore to it and had three seals put on the paper and sent it him as a joke. We start tomorrow the 22nd so you see we are behind our schedule and I suppose you people are all worried to death about us. We will be much longer than six days on our way to Tegucigalpa as we are going shooting and also to pay our respects to Bogran the ex-president and the man who is getting up the next revolution. But we take care to tell everyone we are travelling for pleasure and are great admirers of Bonilla the present president. Somers and I are getting on famously. He is a very fine boy with a great sense of humor and apparently very fond of me. We had five men counting Jeffs who we call our military attache and Charwood and four drivers and eleven mules so it is quite an outfit. In Ecuador with one more man it would constitute a revolution.

DICK.

SANTA BARBARA--January 25, 1895.
DEAR FAM: