Isthmiana

Publisher’s Note

The following sketch, found among the author’s papers after his death, had not received his revision for the press. It was not intended for publication in its present form, and is merely a rapidly-written journal of youthful adventure, in a part of our country then less explored than at present.

The Cruces Road

Ardent Californians, after a day of dragging in the mud and squeezing in the alloys of the Cruces Road, remember the Isthmus of Panama only as a geometrical line; a narrow, difficult, slippery, dirty path, paved like the bed of an Alpine torrent, beset with sloughs of despond and despair, with mosquitoes, tired mules, plundering natives, and bad provender. They follow this geometrical line on their way to California, as a pious Mohammedan treads tremblingly the slender bridge that conducts him to the seventh heaven, — looking forward, but very little around him, feeling painfully that the wire is cutting his feet, and regretting that the grave laws of his religion have not allowed amateur funambulistic practice. To American adventurers struggling towards their seventh heaven, the Isthmus seems to concentrate the obstacles of a continent. In dread of the thousand nameless terrors of the tropics, they hasten to Panama, eat one breakfast of eggs in their omelet stage of existence, and are off up the coast in the steamer.

From the moment of their arrival at Aspinwall an Isthmus fever floats before them, tangibly in the air. It bangs a yellow veil before every object. Their sight is jaundiced. They hurry over a railroad, laid, as they have been told, on human sleepers. The rich luxuriance of the forest along its course, now first opened to the eye of man, seems only rank, unwholesome vegetation. Instead of appreciating the almost superhuman enterprise that has placed such a trophy of civilization in the very home of unchanging repose, they growl because the prudent trains do not despatch them speedily enough to the discomforts of the next stage of their journey. It is nothing strange to them to be greeted by the whistle of a locomotive issuing from the depths of a tropical swamp. Nor strange to pass through an untouched garden of such magnificent, broad-leaved plants, and such feathery palms, as they had only seen before, dwarfed exotics, cherished in warm recesses of a conservatory. The twisted vines that drape the stems and swing from the branches of the massively buttressed trees, are mistaken by their averted glance for the terrible convolutions of gigantic serpents.

They embark on the river, are perplexed by the jabbering confusion of the boatmen, and again hardly observe the beauty that surrounds them. The Chagres is a pure type of the tropical stream. Forests, whose dense luxuriance is only known when you attempt to cut your way wearily through their mazes, overhang its course. High hills rise, covered to the summit with enormous trees, disposed in tiers to display the full effect of their great trunks and spreading foliage. Sometimes a grove of crested palms and cocoanut-trees marks the site of a native village. Its thatched bamboo huts have a shabby picturesqueness among the patches of plantains and sugar-cane. Near, laughing women are grouped in the water, washing clothes and themselves. Soft green savannas open, sprinkled, like a park, with groves and monarch trees; under their shade cattle, have taken shelter from the ardent sun. With constant change of scenes like these, the river winds along, but our party are too much preoccupied, too much distracted, for calm enjoyment.

The naked “bogas” with wild shouts thrust their canoe powerfully along against the current. They stop a moment at shabby Gorgona, to exchange emptied bottles for full ones. They pass the perilous whirlpool of La Gallina. Just at evening they reach the straggling village of Cruces. Their luggage falls into the hands of Philistine porters, whom they chase dispersedly. Arrived at their flimsy hotel, a hasty structure of whitewashed boards, the ladies are inducted into a chamber whose walls are paper, perforated with peep-holes. The gentlemen have “steerage accommodations” of board bunks in a public room. They pass a villanous night, to dream with dread of the morrow.

The morrow comes with row of mules and row of muleteers. The ladies of the party, with regretful remembrances of their last dress-promenade on horseback, are hoisted, califourchon, upon a pack-saddled mule, who, becoming conscious of his fair burden, hurries off down the street, with an inflexible determination to exhibit her at his stable, where his fellows, expecting a sensation, are already braying their compliments. At last the stragglers are collected, and, leaving Cruces to its curs, through a sunlit glade of the tropical forest they enter upon the unknown perils of the road.

Shall we here draw a veil over their progress, and exhibit the party only on the next evening, lounging, in fresh attire, upon Las Boredas, the Battery of Panama, looking out upon the beauty of the bay and inspecting the steamer which awaits them? Or shall we follow them through mud-hole and swamp-hole, through gulley and alley?

The two marked features of the Cruces Road are its mud-holes and its callejons, or alleys. Mud-holes need no description here. The two most profound are “La Sanbujedora” and “La Ramona.” In these I have frequently seen mules sunk to the neck, while their riders vainly endeavored to put a “soul under their ribs of death” by the aid of stout saplings applied upon and under. The callejons are narrow passages cut and worn from ten to twenty feet deep in the soft, friable rock of the frequent transverse ridges. They are wide enough only for a single mule. Long processions of pack-trains passing in perpetual succession have marked the path within with regular footsteps. Dark and cool passages they are, refreshing refuges from. the glare of noon, overhung by the thick forest, draped with delicate mosses and ferns; — convenient channels after the heavy showers of the rainy season, when the steps are concealed, and your mule flounders through, crushing your legs; — nice spots, too, for an ambuscade. When our party, entered the first, there was determined cocking of six-shooters. There are brave deeds in unwritten history. We make a hero of Putnam cantering down the church steps at Horseneck to escape a leaden shower; but till now no chronicler has sung the praises of our party, mule-galloping down the dislocated pavement of a Cruces Road hillside, vainly seeking shelter from the peltings of tropical rain-pellets. Down the hill, and something else is down; for lady No. 2 is over head and ears of her mule, while lady No. 1, who is in advance, ascending, has preferred to dismount at the other end of the animal. Meanwhile the mule of gentleman No. 2 has put the wrong foot foremost in entering a narrow callejon, and, trying to right himself, has gone down like a Polkist on a parquet, carrying his partner with him. Gentleman No. 1, who has already entered the callejon, looks back laughing, but is recalled to his own peril by meeting a pack-train in the narrowest spot. The mules, mischievously twinkling their ears, successively “scrouge” him into the rock; he escapes with the loss of left spur, boot, book, bowie-knife, half pantaloon, and portion of cuticle.

Disgusted with falls backward and falls forward, with mud, with rain, with revengeful beating of their mules, with the whole Cruces Road, our friends are indisposed to admire the luxuriance of the forest, the noble trees of its open glades, the gleams of glowing sunlight through its rain-spangled vine-tracery, the dewy darkness of its moss-covered rock alleys, the glimpse of a far-reaching expanse of dark, untrodden woods.

But mule exercise like this is appetizing; our party are hungry. They stop at a hut decorated with many bottles, bearing classic names, and, not waiting to cast a glance of laughing admiration upon the plantain-fed, cherubic rotundity of the naked urchins, José Marco, José Maria, and José Manuel, who toddle out, they ask for something to eat. All the oranges, all the bananas, all the chickens, all the eggs of the two first classes, are carried off by previous passers. There are still a few third-class eggs, boiling eggs; but on being brought, these are found to be impregnated with a perfume not esteemed in Yankee land, except when public characters already in bad odor are to be further anointed. There is nothing edible except a few rolls of dry-as-dust bread, washed down, perhaps, by a bottle of ale or beer, the nectar of the Isthmus, bearing the unfalsified names of Worthy Bass, Byass, Muir, Tennent, or Whitbread.

With this momentary refreshment onward goes our party. Wearily they plunge through the yellow mud of La Sanbujedora, and emerge yellow; wearily through the blue-black mud of La Ramona, and come out blue-black over yellow; wearily through many-tinted muds, each of which, like a picture-restorer, deposits a new layer of ugliness upon the original, until the original has to be scraped like an old picture to find out the fond. The gentlemen have long ago thrown away their india-rubber coats, and the umbrellas of the ladies have left their last gore upon the briers. In general, the whole party are fit subjects for a chiffonnier, if he would deign to insert his hook into such a mass of mud.

At last the fresh-flowing waters of the Cardenas announce their approach to Panama. They wash away their masks of mud to perceive the exquisite beauty of the tree-embowered ford. Then by the park-like savannas, which they are too tired to see, through the gayety of the suburb Caledonia, which they consider very mal-apropos, across the drawbridge never drawn, under the rusty gateway, they enter and bury themselves in the discomforts of Panama.

In the evening perhaps they take the air upon the Battery, are désorientés by finding the Pacific lying eastward instead of westward. They think everything looks very shabby, and totally unlike the staring newness of a Yankee town. They sleep in an Americanized caravansary; are lulled by the murmur of returned Californian curses, that permeates the house; dream of the alligators and boa-constrictors they ought to have seen. Nightmare comes to them in the shape of the mules they have bestrode. Next morning, wakened by the clinking of the cathedral’s cracked bells, the gentlemen invert their boots to search for scorpions, and the ladies regret that they have anticipated mosquitoes, as one would wish to do strawberries, by three months.

They take boat for the steamer, allow themselves to be bullied and cheated by the boatmen almost as much as strangers in London and New York are by cabmen. Mutual condolences and mutual congratulations are exchanged with the other passengers. Mutual exaggerations of dangers passed and dangers feared are held up for mutual admiration.

All are completely unconscious that not a hundred miles from Panama is a most charming country, a veritable Arcadia.

The Bay

The residents of Panama think no more of the slight fevers of the country, than we do of a severe cold or influenza. You call to pay morning compliments to a lady with whom you have had a passage of arms at the ball of the evening before, and are told quietly that she teine calenturas (has the fever), and is not visible. In a day or two she reappears, undimmed. The fevers of the gentlemen only come on, like colds at a college, when they have unpleasant duties to perform.

Northern constitutions are more impressionable. They melt like an iceberg under the equator. After my second calentura and concomitant quinine, my head felt like a prizefighter’s which has been in chancery. I determined to recruit in a furlough of a fortnight. A couple of friends were going somewhere up the Isthmus. I agreed to join them. We were to take canoe that evening at the turn of the tide. I hastily tumbled together my traps, and borrowing a hammock, and trusting to fortune for want of a friend, was soon ready on the Playa Grande, near the smooth, broad sands of the north beach.

A traveller arriving from the Atlantic side of the Isthmus, with eyes wide open to stare, as Balboa did, at the Pacific, stares wider, when he finds it at Panama to the east instead of the west; and as he sees the sun come up over the softly-glowing bay, he fancies that Pboebus must have been making a night of it, the night before, among the “glorious Apollers,” and turned out of the wrong side of his bed. He is half persuaded that, after all the toils of his trans-Isthmian travel, he has only wandered about as one does in the labyrinths of a tropical forest, and has been brought back to the shores of the tumultuous, keel-vexed, practical Atlantic, instead of looking out upon the sea that washes the shores of Inde and Cathay, the ocean of imagination and hope. So unexpected, also, is the turn of the coast, that, in order to go north to California, you must steer almost due south for a hundred miles. The points of the compass are as much reversed as social position in the golddiggings.

But as ex post facto narratives are doubtless unconstitutional in Yankee literature, let me proceed regularly; and while I am waiting for the tide to rise its twenty-three feet, and cover the conchological mud and crustaceous reef of the Bay, let me speak of the Bay, — this beautiful Bay of the tropics! How often at night, awakened by the tap of Marcellino at my door with the news of a steamer at hand, have I embarked and hastened out upon the water. It would be perhaps an hour before day, but still night, — a night of clear, soft, yet brilliant star light; and there the stars do not glitter with the steely sharpness of a northern sky, but glow; they do not snap out a lively twinkle, but slowly flicker and sway; their light grows upon the eye, as the light of a revolving lighthouse across a stretch of sea. The cool night-breeze would be breathing over the water, freshening as the dawn came on. Wreaths of mist were floating away on the mainland and clinging to the mountainous points of the bay, where perhaps too a black rain-cloud lay lowering. For each climate are its own atmospheric beauties. Nowhere but in England and the Low Countries should you study effects of sunlight through mist and rain-clouds. There is no purple in the world like the purple of Hymettus. Never but at a Florentine sunset can you touch light made tangible, and grasp it, and bathe in it, and be upborne by it. Nowhere else can you see that veil of palpitating azure that flows down after sunset to the Lake of Geneva from the summit of the Jura, the inmost spirit of light making the very peaks transparent. The snow cones of Oregon rise against a background of blue unequalled in depth and brilliancy. In the tropics, and most exquisite at Panama, before sunrise and after sunset there spreads upward from the horizon a violet flush, full of soft glow, vivid with suppressed light.

It is pleasant to look down upon anything or anybody; and the lower one has been, the more delightful becomes the consciousness of present elevation. The age of balloons and bird’s-eye views will develop human vanity to an insufferable degree. But some of our pleasures from looking down have a different origin. A view like this was only meant to be seen from a certain height; it lacks picturesqueness and the necessary features of foreground scenery; it is panoramic in its nature. We will draw it along slowly before the eyes of the reader, interspersing the representation with remarks à la Banvard. Land and water are the chief objects we behold; land oscillating and undulating into hills covered with deep, rich verdure of the tropics, and water blue and clear, with its waves marked only by shifting color, that shoots over the smooth seeming surface, — the ανηριθμον γελασμα of the ocean. The land is the Isthmus of Panama, a narrow bank between two worlds of sea, — one of the obstacles; the water is the Pacific, the ocean of material wealth combined with romance. But though a wild nature still rules undisturbed over the greater portion of the scene before us, yet man has thrust his so-called civilization upon the scene, and that rusty spot that disturbs the purity of the view is one of his beauty-destroying abodes. Those shabby, tiled buildings, those dirty church-spires, and huts like ant-hills surrounding, are Panama,— while a suburb more important than the parent city is represented by a few black spots upon the water, capacious edifices, that move to and fro with the surplus population of the town. At present the small peninsula upon which the town is built is washed by the tide; but when it has fallen, an unsightly reef spreads out on every side, much blasphemed by people who, under a vertical sun and with excoriated feet, walk over its worm-eaten surface. The town is, as we have said, situated upon a small point which terminates in the old Cyclopean sea-wall of the town, where there is a strong bastion, still mounted with some magnificent bronze guns, and serving after parching days as a delicious cool evening promenade for the people. This is Las Bovedas, or the Battery, which deserves a separate essay, so largely does it enter into the list of Panama pleasures and Panama occupations. Away to the north of the town sweeps in a beautiful crescent a smooth, white sand-beach, terminating in a wooded, rocky point, that looks back into the town. A few huts straggle along this, near the town, sheltered by a grove of cocoanut-trees, which serve as parasols or umbrellas, and, while their occasional droppings keep down the super abundant infant population, they at the same time accustom the more warlike to the dangers of a bombardment. Farther along the beach a species of tree grows close down upon the sand, a hedge protecting the land from the sea, but its verdure is traitorous; these are the poisonous manzanilla, the Upas, which our school-boy eloquence so much employed. Beyond the wooded point, another cove, though not so perfect in its form, commences; and here, overgrown with trees and weeds, and partially covered with the quick-forming rock of the country, are the scanty ruins that mark the site of old Panama, the city of that bold, adventurous spirit whose type was Pizarro, and suggested by the very sound of his name. Back of this, and between our view-point and the site of the old town, spread broad savannas, carpeted, like a park, with soft, close-shaven turf; the cattle of a thousand hills graze quietly over its undisturbed surface, and, when the sun blazes, can take refuge in some of the rich groves or close thickets of tropical shrubbery which are picturesquely scattered over its surface, or follow the scanty water-courses. Smooth and carefully kept, like the fair meadows of an English landscape, appear these natural grazing-farms; and respectable enclosed countries, with their walls and hedges and ditches, can offer no pleasure like a free gallop, this way and that, over the plains, when the cool breeze of evening is flowing down over the hills, and every breath bears healing. These llanos lead back to a confused collection of hills, small and conical, like, as a practical friend remarks, the mounds of a potato-patch, and thickly wooded to the top. Their look is as if a sea of land, tossed into irregular waves by a general irruption of diverse winds, had been suddenly petrified. The scene is new and individual.

As the boat made its way to the steamer, the sun, rising, would bring into view the golden crescent of the north beach, with its grove of graceful palms, and its background of dark, wooded hills. The solitary tower that marks the site of old Panama would show itself clearly against the dense vegetation that has enveloped the once famous city. The large islands drew up boldly against the bright horizon, and the small were green resting-places for the eye looking oceanward. The bastions and towers of the town have grown into a Mediterranean variety of outline, and the dark cloud that seemed to overhang it has resolved itself into Ancon Hill. In sharp contrast to the repose of the landscape is the scene on the deck of the steamer. The natives surround her with a flotilla of boats, to make prisoner every disembarking Californian with his plunder. These, squalid and brigand-like, hurry with the recompense of all their toils in view. Boxes of gold-dust are shoved about as of no value. There is confusion and objurgation. But the rising tide warns me that I must defer any further description of the Bay, and return to my journey.

The Boat

The sun had gone down perpendicularly, and, after the soft, pure, purple twilight, hasty night was approaching, as a tremulous motion of the canoe and a gentle plash of the waves warned us it was time to start. The Padron waked, and, calling his hombre passengers, who poco tiempo came on board, got his clearance by going ashore in the still atmosphere, with a candle in his hand, and buying a bottle of chicha. All men of Spanish lineage are named José. All the Josés now sprang into the water, and lifted the canoe from its bed in the mud. Just then a puff of evening breeze swept down from Ancon Hill through the rustling palms, and Josés, taken by surprise, were obliged to swim for it sputteringly, and come on board with Tritonian drippings.

As we glided away, out burst from the other boats a full chorus of Billingsgate adieu. Spanish, the language of devoted tenderness, is likewise a medium for the vilest vituperation. Our crew received and returned assurances of distinguished consideration as lavishly as diplomates; and as hit or retort told, the quiet bay resounded with inextinguishable laughter. Gradually all these sounds died away in the distance. Panama became the ghost of a city, over which Ancon Hill hung darkly brooding. We rustled softly along in silence, except when another marketboat, passing, exchanged flying shots or a broad side. The Padron was a man of few words; he reserved his fire until it would tell, and then poured in a stunner, laughing suppressedly until the canoe shook. Presently my companion turned in, and I remained with the night.

The canoes that do the coast market trade of Panama are made mostly in Darien, hollowed by tool and fire from the trunks of enormous tropical trees. Ours, a fair type of the class, was about forty feet long, seven beam, round bottom, and very little keel; she consequently rolled like a hollow log, as she was. She carried two stumpy masts, with ragged square-sails and a small foretopsail. This last kept the Padron in a very uncomfortable state; but, as one of the most distinguished mariners of the Bay, he considered it due to his pre-eminence to carry it as a broad pennant. Such boats make voyages of more than one hundred miles up and down the coast, and bring to Panama pigs, turkeys, chickens, eggs, rice, maize, plantains, pumpkins, yams, olives, potatoes, candles, cocoanuts, chica, cheese, &c. They carry a considerable number of native passengers, going up to sell their own stuff. Picturesque craft themselves, their arrival makes the beach near the market-place lively and picturesque as a sea-shore of Claude. When selling of eggs and oranges becomes the sole business of a life, it is dignified, and I have seen from the Panama market-women, classically “demi vetues de ces plis transparents qui collent aux statues,” melodramatic action that would have done honor to Rachel in Lucrece.

The night was the perfection of a night of the tropics, softly brilliant. It seemed as if the glowing sunlight of the day had penetrated the earth, had been garnered up, and was now diffused through the chastened air, like the tender memory of a dazzling passion. Consecrate to love should be such nights; so I remained idly dipping my hand in the water as we unconsciously glided along. Presently a circle of fair forms closed around me, as the nymphs about Rinaldo in the enchanted grove. Each bore the scarcely recognized lineaments of some well-known face. One detached herself from the throng and laid her hand upon my shoulder. As she approached, a masculine hardness grew over her delicate features, the graceful floating of her sylph-like robe resolved itself into a conventional attire, a black beard covered the bloom of her cheeks; she whispered, “Señor, the boat has no gunwale; you will fall overboard if you go to sleep.” “Thank you, Padron,” said I, starting up and looking into the crib where I had seen my companions disappear, as pigeons into a dove-cot. We three had hired the whole cabin; it was on deck, about two feet and a half high. My two comrades, taking comfort while I took romance, had stowed themselves fore and aft, leaving only a very narrow space athwartship for me. How I got into my place is a secret with me and the manufacturers of india-rubber springs; and how I slept, the journals of the guests of Procrustes will explain. So, then, the earliest of morning saw me on deck, looking at the new scenes around me. White sheep are said to eat more than black ones because there are more of them, and as sunrise does not enter into the daily experience of the civilized world, it is generally conceded to be rather an inferior, sleepy sort of a display. If I had been under the dominion of this popular fallacy, this sunrise would have given a new view of the subject.

Thanks to a fresh night-breeze, we had made lively progress during my torpidity, and were still bowling along finely with a shore wind on the quarter. The foretopsail was still the trial of the Padron’s life. The island-mountain of Taboga was far behind us. Melones, where I had once vainly brought all my gastronomical knowledge to bear to make my first pelican palatable, was a mere line upon the horizon. Otoque was dim to seaward. We lay opposite the lofty, bold sierra of the Morro di Chame. Beyond stretched a yellow line of beach, to be traversed on our return journey by land. We were perhaps eight miles from shore; but in the clearness of the dawn an exquisite, partially wooded slope was revealed, rising gently to the high main ridge of the Isthmus. There were no stars in the sky, but the same violet flush, unknown to the cold North, was spreading upward to the zenith. There is no temptation for Aurora to dilly-dally in the tropics. She finds the saffron-bed of Tithonus too warm in the warm morning. She will hasten to draw up coolness from the dim thickets of the swamp-forest, to catch a handful of fresh snow from the summits of the Cordillera.

Presently up comes a great round glare of a sun, and the fresh wind, unwilling to become a sirocco, flees away before him.

Jollity among the natives had awakened with the dawn. Happy in the bliss of only one garment and no toilette to make, they had devoted the time we waste in such employ to the cultivation of their social faculties. Fragments of jokes and droning songs had come past the perilous foretopsail, perilous no longer. Now their jollity was over; the sun was upon them; they baked in silence, or occasionally only spluttered a little, like an unwilling oyster roasting.

Fortunately I was provided with that resource of a listless traveller, a novel of Alexandre Dumas. All that blasting day, as we lay under the shade of the mainsail, utterly becalmed except in temper, the boat quivered with my laughter as I followed the wanderings of “Les Trois Mousquetaires.”

All that day we lay pinned by the rays of the vertical sun. We might have supposed that our canoe had sprouted, like a sea-plant, and sent downward its long roots to the bottom of the sea. The Padron had forgotten the foretopsail, and in a dull slumber let the tiller carry him about at its wabbling will.

There was no sign of life; whales, usually so abundant, refused to come to the surface, lest their breath, heated to explosion, might not find speedy enough exit through its escape-pipe; the sharks were off, as usual, after the California steamer; they have acquired a taste for Yankees. Occasionally a bird flew past us, panting for the woods.

What my companions did all the day I know not. I have some indistinct recollection of their frying slices of ham on the palms of their hands, and I am quite sure that I heard a sound of boiling as one applied an orange to his highly tanned lips.

It is warm on the desert of Sahara; it is warm in the cañons of California; it is warm in the snows of Alpine passes in August; it is warm on the sands of the Great Salt Lake Valley; it is warm, very warm at the Newport ball; a Strasburg goose has a warm time, — so did John Rogers. But if you wish to know what the word Hot means, — if you wish to experience the sensation of having every drop of your blood baked into brick-dust, — be becalmed in a bungo in the Bay of Panama.

As for me, the supernatural coolness of my heroes somewhat assisted me, and I managed to survive, though I have appreciated much better, ever since, the curse of Kehama.

With evening freshened the breeze and recommenced our life. The natives, as happy a set. as the coast Indians of North America, eat their simple fare of plantains and yams with laugh and joke. They are happy in few wants. The Padron was an excellent specimen of his race, a fine, honest, clear-eyed fellow, with delicate features. The crew were active, lithe chaps, well put together, muscular, though without any of that exaggerated development that marks the arm of a wood-chopper or the calf of a danseuse. The character of these Isthmians has been much belied by travellers. The great rascals of the Isthmus are mostly foreigners, renegades from the West Indies and coasts of South America; here they find a harvest. The people of a thoroughfare country undoubtedly always deteriorate, and the transit to California has had a bad effect on the natives. Money is lavished among them; they have few artificial wants to supply, and, having no other way of spending, consequently consume it in riotous living. Personally I have never met with anything but civility, and even kindness; their easy dilatoriness must be treated philosophically. Of course the poco tiempo style of management does not suit a Yankee. His interests are all-important to himself, and, accustomed to make all obstacles yield, he is annoyed and exasperated to find that there are people who, when they have enough for the moment, are contented. It is not indolence, but sound philosophy, in a cargadore or an arriero of Panama, knowing that in two days he can earn enough money for a week’s support, to give up work, and take the satisfaction in life that nature marked out for him. He need not wait till old age for repose. He has no conventional wants. It is not his place in life to become a tool of civilization, of a civilization unknown and uncared for; he need not spend an existence in toil that the proletariat of distant France may eat brown-bread; that the vine-dressers of the Rhine may live; that a certain number of carpenters and masons may earn two dollars a day in building his warehouses and mansions; and that squads of the potato-fed may stretch him a thousand miles of railroad. It is all very well to say, “Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay”; but to whom is it better? To the delicately nurtured, to the cared-for of fortune, the fruges consumere natus, but not to the ignorant, the forgotten, — no, not forgotten, — the intentionally crushed peasant, brutalized beyond barbarism by the selfishness of systems, of societies, not founded upon the theory of equal rights to all. Nature is kind to all in the tropics.