Page:Our Neighbor-Mexico.djvu/26

 22 hath it—till I find myself where our "Sunny South" is far away to the north, and where even our country is printed on the map "the United States of the North." Much as some of our good neighbors may dislike to be called Northern people, they are compelled to endure that affliction from Mexican lips. This proud and sensitive nation calls itself" the United States of Mexico," and it will not allow another body of commonwealths on the continent to call itself "the United States of America."

If our brethren had achieved their independence they might have been compelled to conform to this nomenclature, and called their country the Central United States. Fortunately, they can and will yet rejoice in the continental title which includes centre and circumference in its all-embracing area.

This experience on the steamer has led to all these musings. Better these than that dreary heaving of the stomach and the sea. How the outside and the inside miserably harmonize! The gray I get glimpses of through that bit of a hole in the side of the ship, as the berth tips over, lets me sickly see a like sick sea. The waves toss wearily on their bed, and I am glad, in a miserable way, that I have even this sort of communion with nature.

The Yazoo carries us to Havana and to midsummer in sixty hours. The hot bay seems hotter than New York's hottest. Its round rim is ablaze with direct and reflected burnings. The golden sand-hills shoot back the golden rays in increased fervor and brilliance. The palm gives a shadeless shade, as would an umbrella stuck on the top of a twenty-foot pole. The cactus, least lovely and not least useful of tropical plants, thick sets its quoit-like leaves with thorns. Deep sheds cover the quays, protecting from the fiery blaze both man and beast: which is which, is yet undecided, since both are beasts here, the mule often less so than the man. Under their broad roofs goes ceaselessly on the busy loading of sugar and oranges and bananas, the busy unloading of bales and barrels of Northern fields and mills.

The slave is still here. He is a vanished institution northward across that blue gulf, and already in his last stages of serfhood