Page:A Life of Matthew Fontaine Maury.pdf/263

Rh He wrote to his children, on the eve of his departure from Mexico:—

The English steamer in which I have paid my passage (49 pounds and 10 shillings), is now overdue ten days, and her day for sailing again is the day after to-morrow. I left Mexico on Saturday the 24th at 3 ; arrived at Puebla at 7, where I pernocted in a room with divers others for $2; was called at 1 and off again at 2, over a very rough road—a very fatiguing journey. Passed between long hedges of the lordly Maguey, shooting up its magnificent stems or stalks, as large and as high and as straight as a common telegraph-pole. Indeed, unless you are near enough to see the wires, I found it often difficult to tell the one from the other. This pet of Flora's, with its enormous height and proportions, is pushed up in the course of 6 or 7 days.

To compare small things with great, imagine an enormous asparagus-stalk—say one day old, and before it had swelled out sufficiently to begin to burst and shoot out branches—and imagine it to be 18 or 20 inches in circumference, and 30 or 40 feet high, and you have the Maguey, as I generally see it, rising from its magnificent tuft of foliage 30 feet round and 12 feet high. Occasionally the more forward ones had commenced to shoot out from the top, and horizontally, their splendid flower bracts. The coach ascended the slopes of the Cumbres, the highest range between Mexico and the Gulf; we left the "Court of Bacchus," and entered the cloud region. It was blowing a furious gale; the wind was howling among the rocks and cliffs, and driving a cold and penetrating mist through a white darkness so thick that you could see nothing beyond the distance of a few feet. It was piercing cold. I had on three flannel shirts; but as we began to climb, I began to draw around and button up, and finally found myself wrapped in cloak and blanket and uncomfortably cold. Presently we dropped down through the thick cloud right into the bright sunshine, and the loveliest view that it was possible for the heart of man to conceive. There was