Page:Our Neighbor-Mexico.djvu/22

 18 a vivid fact of three centuries and over ago, a mediæval story of marvel and mystery. In fact, Prescott's "Conquest" has made that of its subject, Cortez, to fade. And one is half tempted to believe that the real conquistador was not the strong-brained, strong-limbed, strong-souled Spaniard, but the half-blind and wholly meditative Bostonian. The Achilles and his Homer are worthy of their several fame. Yet the land on which, or out of which, each won his chief glory is still superior to them both. A run along some of its chief paths of interest may make this fact patent to other eyes.

Just as our North was putting on its winter night-robes, which it did not take off for four long months, I packed my valise, three of them, as became a "carpet-bagger," and moved southward.

Snow chased me as far as Richmond; moist, mild June met me at Montgomery; oranges, in clusters, plucked fresh from the boughs, were passed through the cars near Mobile; and New Orleans welcomed me to summer skies, and showers, and flowers. A Northern touch of sharp and almost icy weather made the steamer for Havana less unwelcome. So a glimpse at good friends, and a coming and going grasp of hands, including a coming but not going grasp of hearts, and the steamer and I are off.

A character that I met on the steamer, by its strangeness relieved the sea-qualms, and, if for no other reason, deserves a sketch. He was a type of a vanishing class—few, I hope, at any time, but not without existence. He was a Havana planter, who had come to New Orleans to sell his crop, and was returning brimful of cash and whisky; nay, not brimful of the latter, or, if so, with great capacity of enlargement—worse than some prolix preachers possess over their text. When the captain entered the cabin, he greeted him with a shower of oaths—not in rage, but in good humor—that being almost his only vocabulary. He called constantly for every sort of liquor—beer, gin, wine, whisky. He drank all the three days and nights like a fish, if a fish ever drinks. It never drinks such stuff as he constantly poured down his inflamed throat. The stuff that went in and that came out were alike horrible.