Our Neighbor-Mexico/Chapter III
III.
THE SEA -PORT.
Under the Cocoa-nut Palm.—The Plaza.—The Cathedral.—No Distinction on account of Color either in Worshiper or Worshiped.—The Watering-place of Cortez.—I low the Palm looks and grows.—Other Trees of the Tropics.—Home Flowers.—July Breakfast in January.—Per Contra, a Norther.—Its Utility.—Harbor and Fort.—Size and Shape of the City.—Its Scavenger.—Its Houses.—Street Life.—The Lord's Day.—First Protestant Service.—The Railroad Inauguration.
My friend, Theodore Cuyler, has written many a racy talk for The Evangelist, with the heading "Under the Catalpa." He is outdone this time—a hard thing to do. He can not write "Under the Cocoa-nut Palm;" nor can he write, as I might also, "Under the Tulipan," whose great scarlet blossoms are now blushing over my head; nor "Under the Chinese Laurel," which a slight change in my seat would enable me to do; nor "Under the Australian Gum-tree," a tall elm-like tree, first brought here by Maximilian, and which rushes up to forty and sixty feet in a few years, in this hot air and soil. I have made a point on him, though it took many a point by sea and land, and many a mile from point to point, to gain even this slight advantage.
I am sitting on a green slat-wood and iron lounge, such as are scattered about the Public Garden of Boston and the Central Park of New York, though they are not much occupied there after this fashion on this New-year's-day. The Plaza de la Constitution, the only plaza of Vera Cruz, is where this bench is located, a square of about three hundred feet to a side, which is well filled with trees and shrubs of every sort of tropical luxuriance, with flowers of many hues and odors, a large bronze fountain in its centre, and benches girdling its circumference. Carlotta's gift is this, they say, to the city.
The sun lies hot on the house-tops, and wherever it can strike a pavement. The general costume consists of a shirt and pants: the shirt white, short, plaited all around, and worn often by the peasantry on pleasure-days as an outer garment—a not unseemly arrangement.
GOVERNOR'S PALACE AT VERA CRUZ.
Every body is in gay costume, for is it not the first day of the year? And, in addition, does not the daily morning paper, named El Progresso, on the ground, probably, that it never progresses, declare that it is an extra festival-day, because on this day occurred the circumcision of Saint Odilon, and the birth of Saint Euphrosyne the Virgin? Who these are, it does not deign to declare.
But that sun creeps round the corner of the church on this seat, and blazes so fiercely that I must fly or be consumed. Another cocoa-nut palm welcomes me; really another angle of the great church on the opposite side of the street.
That church has just concluded its service—a service without song, or preaching, or audible prayer, or aught else but genuflexions and osculations, and mutterings and millinery. Yet it was filled with women and children dressed in their best attire, and in one respect was ahead of any church I have ever seen in America: all classes and colors meet together. On the same bench sits the Beacon Street lady, in her silks and laces, and the poor beggar in her blue tunic, with her mantle carefully brought up on her head in the church, "because of the angels." The Indian, Negro, Spaniard, all are here, often rolled together in one. Not the least dressed and genteel are these Indian dames of high degree. When shall our better type of faith and worship equal this in its one grand principle, "Ye are brethren?" How hideous a mockery must a white and a colored church appear to the Lord, who is Maker and Saviour of us all! The Romanist is putting this fact assiduously before the mind of our Southern caste-bound brothers. It is their only stronghold; God give us strength to surpass them in this grace, as we have in all else. Not doing thus, we shall find our excellent ointment sending forth an offensive savor, and their offensive ointment surpassing ours in sweetness. Among the wax virgins of this sacristy is a negress, the adaptation of this Church to its votaries being thus signally marked.
I have just returned from an excursion to Medillin, some twelve miles into the country, the summer watering-place of Vera Cruz. It is winter now, and out of season. From March to June that Saratoga reigns. The consul-general of Mexico, Dr. Skilton, and the consul of the port, Dr. Trowbridge, were my companions—two physicians who won a high name in the army, and deserve and honor the stations they occupy. The air was soft as June, and our thin clothes, even to seersucker and linen, were all that we needed, and more. Flowers of every hue and fragrance blossomed along the way.
The cocoa-nut palm abounded, of all heights and ages. The older ones had a smooth bark, made of its own dead leaves, crowned with long, bending branches, made up of spines like ribs going out of a backbone. It begins in these spines, and they seem to grow together as new ones shoot out, so that the trunk is itself a leaf. These leaves hang dead and loose in their upper edges, ragged and gray, but bind the trunk at their juncture. Every new burst of leaves gives a new cincture and a new raggedness. The rains wear off the rags, and the old trees stand smooth in bark, with the rings marked upon the bark of these successive growths of leaves. They are of every height, from a few feet to a hundred.
You see on the ride many tall, wide-branching trees of the acacia tribe, with a light gauze leaf; others of deepest green, and wonderful for shade, which are not unlike the maple in shape, but are denser of color and shade. That is the mango, whose apple even the foreigners put as the front fruit of the world, and which, therefore, may have been the very apple that tempted Eve and ruined Adam.
I have not yet followed the example my first mother and father set me, if this be the fruit, and I can not therefore say how strong was their temptation; for though the leaf be green exceedingly, the time of the mango is not yet. The banyan, orange, banana, and other trees, too numerous to mention, especially when you do not know their names, throng the road to Medillin. The convolvulus, or morning-glory, of every color covers the roadside, with its running vine and flowers. And there, on a little marsh, raises its sweet and lovely cup, the water-lily, blooming here just as deliciously, and just as superior to all rivals, on this January the first, as it will blossom unrivaled in the ponds of New England the July following.
A stumpy old man brings a bouquet of roses, common blush and white, for which we pay two reals, or twenty-five cents, and that is as much again as he expected. In this we count thirty-eight large double roses in blossom, with buds many. Had that been bought for a New York table on this New-year's-day, it would have cost nearer ten dollars.
The country people are coming to town; for it is somebody's feast-day, and the railroad opening too. This modern secular and ancient ecclesiastical holiday, joined together, is too much for the Aztec. So he has donned his spotless white, and she her spotless gray; for the female human bird, like the feathered biped, is here less gorgeously arrayed than its male. Off they tramp to the city. His shirt, plaited and polished before and behind, depends over like-lustrous trowsers, well buttoned on the side with tinkling bell-buttons that rattle, if they do not ring, to the music of his going. Some are on horseback. Two trotting near the track get frightened at the cars, and back their steeds from the path. A broad ditch is behind the narrow way, and one of the horses plunges therein and tips his clean rider over into the black mush. A loud laugh is all the consolation he gets for the splash and its ruin of his holiday costume.
Medillin is a town of sheds, roofed with thatch, and a few houses of brick or wood, with broad arcades for drinking, dancing, and gambling. The season not being on, none of these were going on, except a breakfast or two, which were excellent. It certainly seemed out of place to wander round that open garden, full of roses and oranges and all manner of hot-house plants, on this New-year's morning, and to sit in the open hall, eating as delightful breakfast as my "International Moral Science Association" brother of Ireland ever got up at somebody else's expense. But the cool hall was a pleasant refuge from the heat, and we found the watering-place refreshing in January. A river, used for bathing, makes it the favorite resort of Vera Cruzians. Cortez frequented it, and built a chapel there. He seems to have done that everywhere; piety and impiety being nearly equal in him.
As we go to the cars, I measure the leaves of lilies growing wild along the track. From the central joint to the tip, I could lay my arm from the elbow to the tip of the finger—just a cubit, or a foot and a half. The whole leaf was over two feet in length, and of corresponding breadth. This was the size of nearly all of them. An Indian and his wife were gathering oranges. Huge fruit, as big as small pumpkins, hung from bushes not unlike the quince. Such is this land; are you not home-sick for it? If so, let me make you contented to stay where you are, by trying to describe that indescribable horror which you must or may encounter to get here.
I had heard of simoons and cyclones, and hurricanes and Hatteras storms, but till I touched this Gulf steamer I had never heard of a "Norther." I began to hear hints about its possibility, and how, when it raged, no ship could leave Havana or land at Vera Cruz; that it occurred about every four or five days this season of the year, and that every seaman disliked and even dreaded it.
Our vessel had pushed on a swift and even keel to the last day but one. I was about concluding that the semi-qualmish state would not develop any more violent stages, and was even getting ready to follow Byron, and stroke the mane of this wild beast of the world, that rages and devours from shore to shore —even as a scared child, holding firmly to the parental arms and legs, may rub its tiny hand on the neck of the huge dog that has frightened it—when, lo! at five o'clock in the morning, after leaving Progresso, I was slung violently up and down, clinging in desperation to the door of the room, which was, fortunately, fastened back to my berth. The ship seemed on its beam-ends. Up and down she flung herself in a rage of fear or madness. Up and down we followed, sick and scared.
After much ground and lofty tumbling, the berth is abandoned, with great reeling and sickness, for the deck. Perched among the shrouds that lash the base of the mast, or reeling along the side of the drunken vessel, I enjoy the Norther. The sea is capped with foam; the waves leap short and high; the boat goes down these sharp and sudden hills of water, and is hurled back on its haunches by trying to mount the hills coming up on the other side of the hollow. How she staggers and falls down, and picks herself up and is knocked down again, and blindly rears and as blindly falls! Her freight has been chiefly left at Havana and Progresso, and so she behaves worse than she might have otherwise done. I had never seen so crazy a creature on the sea. I thought the long swells of the Atlantic, the short surges of the Mediterranean, and even the chopping waves of the English Channel and the Huron Bay bad enough, but this Mexican Norther excelled them all. Do you wish to pay that toll to see this garden? It will pay; for sea-sickness, like toothache, never kills.
There was not much done that day except to lurch with the lurching ship. "Now we go down, down, downy, and now we go up, up, uppy." Now on your back, and now on your face. Still we contrived to sit it through, and to have a good talk on religion with a Boston gentleman, who, like so many of his city, had no religion to talk about, being not Christian, nor even Pagan, not so much infidel, as faith-less: not anti-believing as non-believing. Like that ignorant backwoodsman who, being asked if he loved the Lord Jesus, honestly replies, "I've nothing agin him." Yet he that is not for Him, having known of Him, is against Him, and so non-Christianity is anti-Christianity.
How much is Christian faith needed in that Christian town! And what a record have they to meet who have taken away our Lord, and given the people a stolid self-reliance, or more stolid fatalistic indifference as their only religion! But our lively friend could sing—what Bostonian can not, since the Jubilee?—and he mingled "Stabat Mater," "Coronation," and camp-meeting melodies in a pure Yankee olla-podrida. May this song-gift yet lead the singer to the grace it springs from and to!
Toward night the winds and waves abated slightly, and after midnight they lulled to sleep. But long after the Norther had blown itself away, the waves rolled slow and steady but deep and long, as if they themselves were tired out, and the steamer swung to and fro evenly and weariedly.
As the storm is gone, so that more violent one of sin shall blow over, and the race of man, like a convalescent but tired child in the arms of its mother, shall rock itself to sleep in the arms of its Saviour, God. Cowper's words, so befitting that sick and weary ship-company, are not an unbefitting prophecy. I was comforted with them as I lay in that tossing berth:
"Six thousand years of sorrow have well-nigh
Fulfilled their tardy and disastrous course
Over a sinful world; and what remains
Is merely as the working of a sea
Before a calm that rocks itself to rest."
Are our present waves the passing away of this Norther of sin? Is the level sea of universal grace and goodness appearing? It is; but perhaps many a Norther must yet rage before the heavenly and perpetual calm prevails.
A good word may be said for most of God's creatures, and the Norther has its bright side. But for it, Vera Cruz could not exist. It may create qualms on shipboard, but it drives away the yellow fever on shore. Its coming concludes that pestilence, though it is said to also conclude the lives of all prostrated with the disease at its coming, their relaxed system succumbing to its over-tonical force. So we may accept the lesser evil in view of the greater blessings that it brings, and rejoice that Northers rage in the Gulf of Mexico.
The reason why this storm prevents a landing is that there is no real harbor here, and the situation of the port is such that the north wind drives the waves straight on and over the mole, its only dock, which is a few hundred feet long. The waters rise and roll over this wharf, and prevent all landing. Indeed, the waves could hardly allow a boat upon them, were a landing possible, so high they mount. When it is on, communication ceases, and visitors to the ship, or sailors on the shore, have no means of getting to their own place. Yet all this could be cured by a few score thousand dollars. The castle lies two miles, perhaps, from the shore, and reefs extend a third of the way toward it on the northern side. A breakwater could easily be built over the rest of the way, and the harbor of Vera Cruz laugh at the peril of the north wind, and enjoy its refreshment. Some time the government will make this improvement. Yet "manaña" (to-morrow), they would say here: their word for all enterprises and duties.
Our Norther has subsided, and we enter the sunny bay, on the last Saturday morning in December, as warm and delicious a morning as ever broke over New York Bay in June, as George L. Brown's painting of that city superbly represents. The walls of the city of the True Cross break on the eye—a speck of superior whiteness amidst the glittering sand-dunes that inclose it, but a whiteness that does not increase as you approach. Small palms scantily scatter themselves among the sand-hills, and thin grass and a parched vegetation, though far-away hills lift a solid terrace of green to your fascinated eyes, and, towering over all, Orizaba raises its snow-capped spear, a peak of unequaled beauty. All the zones are around and before you, from Greenland to Abyssinia.
The harbor is empty of shipping; only four or five vessels lie on its dangerous sea. The famous castle, San Juan d'Ulloa, is a large, round fortress, of a dingy yellow. A castle impregnable, it is said, except to assault, which was never attacked that it was not taken. Cortez professed to expend thirteen millions upon it; and Charles the Fifth, once calling for his glass, and looking through it, westward, was asked what he was looking for. "San Juan d'Ulloa," he replied. "I have spent so much on it, that it seems to me I ought to see it standing out on the western sky."
We anchor off the costly folly, and are greeted by officials and friends. Boats soon put us on the mole, and we are in the sea-port of the United States of Mexico.
This city consists of sixty acres, be they more or less, inclosed with a begrimed wall, from ten to twenty feet in height. Boston Common is not far from the size of Vera Cruz; its burned district 
VERA CRUZ
considerably larger. It has one principal street running back from the shore a single block. A horse railway passes down this Cade Centrale once a half hour or so, and for a real, or twelve and a half cents, takes you the near a mile that street extends. But it takes no one, as all who have money have no desire to leave the block or two about the plaza; and all who are obliged to go from centre to circumference have no money. So the Spanish Yankee fails of success in this enterprise.
One street runs parallel with the Centrale the entire length of the city, and two shorter ones fill out the arc that the rear wall makes. Eight or ten cross these at right angles. That is all of the True Cross, viewed geographically. Numerically, it has fifteen thousand inhabitants, of whom over one thousand are foreigners, and only about five thousand can read or write. The Indian population predominates in numbers, and the Spanish in wealth and influence, though the Mexican is a conglomerate of both, and each in its separate or blended state is without social degradation or distinction.
Its chief street has two arcades, with little markets and tables for brandy or coffee sippers. It has a score or two of stores, some with quaint names, such as "El Pobre Diabolo" (The Poor Devil), over a neat dry-goods house, whose merchant thereby humbly confesses he does not make over "one per shent" on every two. Another has B. B. B. as his initials: "Bueno, Bonito, Barato" (good, pretty, cheap).
The streets are narrow, as they should be in hot countries. Tiny rivulets trickle down their centres, and disinfectants in the sickly season nightly cleanse these open sewers.
Another and a more important source of its cleanliness is the buzzard. I had been taught to detest the buzzard, perhaps because it was black. I had heard how unclean a thing it was, and was exceedingly prejudiced against it. But I find, to my surprise, that here this despised and detested creature is the sacred bird, almost. It darkens the air with its flocks, roosts on the roofs, towers, steeple-tops, everywhere. A fine of five dollars is levied against one who shoots one of them. It is the most privileged individual of the town. The reason why? It is the street-cleaner. It picks the offal from gutter or sidewalk, and nothing escapes its hungry maw. Its business may not be cleanly, but its person is. It never looks soiled, but its black wings shine, and its beak is as white as "store teeth." It looks like a nice house-maid whose service does not make her soiled. It is a large bird, looking like the turkey, though of a different species, and of a broad, swift wing, that sustains it in long flights. It appears very solemn, the priest of the air, especially when it sits on the cross of the churches, one on each arm frequently, and one on the top. Once I saw two thus sitting on the top, one on the other, as quiet and churchly as though each were carved in stone. Hood says,
"The daw's not reckon'd a religious bird,
Because it keeps a-cawing from the steeple."
But the buzzard comes nearer that desert, and by its solemn air, clerical garb, and sanitary service, may claim a place in, as well as on, the sanctuary. Perhaps some foes of the cloth might say its greediness and determination to have the last mite, if alive, was also a proof of this relationship. At any rate, unlike the daw, it is the protected if not the petted bird of the city, and helps keep off the pestilence, which has a blacker hue and more horrible nature than the worst of its enemies ever attributed to it. Honor to this faithful black servant of man, as to those featherless bipeds of like hue, that are more worthy of our praise for their more excellent service.
The houses hug the narrow sidewalks, each with a large portal opening into a roofless court, and with windows scantily piercing their second story. They very rarely go higher. Not a building inclosing the chief plaza is above this height. Hotel, warehouse, and governor's residence close with the second story. The third occasionally appears; but fourth and fifth, up to seventh and eighth, with Mansard roofs—two stories more—these Paris and New York luxuries are here unknown. Why? Because the earth gets sea-sick here. Ex-President Hill's theory, that a fire is fed from below, and must be put out by pouring water on its base, and not on its summit, obtains here in regard to earthquakes. The earth shakes from below, and would topple down these towers on the haughty heads that dared to lift them up. So the city well-nigh reaches the Sybarite perfection Edward Everett Hale approves, and is hardly ever over two stories, and is much of it of his perfect perfection of one story. These houses are of mortar or stone, all of them, and very broad of base and thick of wall. They hug the earth so close that she can not throw them off. She must tip herself clean over, before she can turn these houses on the heads of their builders. Those builders' heads were level, and their works are also.
The wind flows through the open windows, cool as the midsummer sea-breeze—never cooler. The streets have donkeys, carrying water in kegs, milk in bottles, charcoal (their only fuel) in bags, grasses for thatch, and other burdens. A carriage I have not yet seen. One is said to exist here, but it is not visible to the naked eye. A few horses are used, chiefly by the haciendados, or farmers, riding into town. Even the ladies turn out on foot to the grand reception to the President on the opening of the railway to the capital. The horse-car is the only vehicle, and that is useless. The city is a Venice, but for its mules and asses.
The fountain at the head of Callé Centrale is a favorite resort for these few beasts, and for many water-carriers. There is abundance of water; and nowhere in this country, or any country, are there cleaner streets or superior baths. Yet buzzard and bath, free fountain and washed street, do not keep off the yellow fever. The walls, some think, cause it, as they shut out the winds—the only thing they do shut out, every foe easily subduing them. They should be leveled, if they kill thus those they pretend to protect.
The business of the city is quite large. Some houses do a million and a half a year; for here come about all the goods of Europe and America that enter Mexico. But the houses that get the trade 
FOUNTAIN AT VERA CRUZ.
are foreign, and chiefly German, so that the people of the country are still poor, poorer, poorest.
The Lord's Day is an unknown institution in Vera Cruz. The Spaniards have given it the right name, properly distinguishing between the Sabbath, which they give to Saturday (Sabbato), and the Lord's Day (Domingo). We could follow their example. It would save much debate, and clarify and steady many a conscience, if we could see the Lord's Day in our nomenclature. We should then perceive its sacred delight and obligation. Yet if it turned out with us as with these, the name had better be left unchanged. Stat nominis sacri umbra; and only that shadow stands. All else is gone. The shops are open, the workmen busy. The church is attended once, as in the mummeries this morning. Then the circus came riding down the street; the clown and two pretty boys ahead, preparatory to performing outside the walls. It was the first band of music I had heard on Sunday since that which awoke me in Detroit last summer. How sad and striking the resemblance! Shall our German infidelity and mis-education make our land like Mexico? Or shall a holy faith and a holy life make this land like the New England of our fathers? As Mr. Lincoln said, "Our nation must be all slave or all free;" and as One infinitely greater said, "A house divided against itself can not stand;" so America, North and South, the United States and Mexico, must be all Christian in its Sabbath sanctity, or all diabolic.
I walked out in the afternoon to the cemetery, feeling that the best church and congregation were to be found there. The way led over the alameda, or a short bridge across a tiny stream, which is lined with young cocoa-nut palms, and stone seats for loungers. Here Cortez once built a bridge ten feet or so long, for which he charged the government three millions of dollars, making even Tweed lower his haughty front before this Castilian grandeur of thieving. The Church of Christ stood a little beyond, with huts of the poor near it—a church where funeral services are mostly performed. A poor old man was kneeling on a bench near the door, with arms outspread, and agonized face, muttering earnestly. Oh that he could have been spoken to, so that he might have been taught the way of life more perfectly, and might have gone down to his house justified and rejoicing in the Lord Jesus, to whom not one of his muttered prayers was addressed!
The Street of Christ leads out half a mile to the Campo Santo. Well-named is that street, if lowliest people are nearest him, and if the grave is his triumphant goal.
The walls of the grave yard are high and deep. Tall obelisks stand at either corner. The dead sleep not in the open area, which is unoccupied, but in the walls. Tablets cover the recess that incloses the coffin, and words of tenderness rather than of faith bedew the marble. Not the highest faith. No such beautiful words as are found on the monuments of the saintly dead of Protestant climes shine forth here. Northampton has no rival here, that choicest of grave-yards in its simplicity of elegance and richness of Scriptural and Christian quotation. Mount Auburn is surpassed, however. I heard the Misses Warner once say they had found scarcely any motto of Scriptural faith and hope in that cemetery. It is as stony in its faith as in the hewn and polished walls that engirt each tiny lot. It has marble dogs, and granite sphinxes, and bass-relief expressmen, wreathed pillars, and statues of men of renown, but rare is a monument or a line of faith. It will strike others thus. Edwards, and Fisk, and Wayland ought to stand in marble among its statues, and Christianity speak from its faithless, glittering graves. Let those whose believing dead are buried there make them preach their faith from their sepulchres.
Yet in the Campo Santo itself I found food for meditation, if not in its inscriptions. I gathered its flowers, growing wild and beautiful over its area, and returned as from a Sabbath-day's journey, strengthened in the Gospel truth and work.
That evening, through the kindness of the American consul, a congregation of nearly thirty gathered in his rooms, and held a Christian service. "Rock of Ages" and "Jesus, lover of my soul," were sung, and the word spoken from "To you that believe, he is precious." It was the first service the Holy Catholic (not Roman) Church ever held in that city. It was good to be there, as many felt. We found young men at work on the railroad who were members of the Baptist Church. Those who were, in order or education, Presbyterians, Methodists, and Episcopalians, were also present. It seemed as if the day-star was about to arise over this long-darkened soil. If schools were established here by Christian teachers, and a service held regularly in English, the nucleus of a church would be organized, and the work soon be extended to the native population. This first Christian service has not proved the last. Already the Presbyterians have a flourishing mission. Others will doubtless follow.
The city is putting on its best bib-and-tucker, for to-morrow President Lerdo de Tejada is to arrive, and great is to be the rejoicing The government residences are being tastefully arrayed, and coats of white, yellow, and blue wash are spread over all the buidings surrounding the square. I never knew before how easily and cheaply one can renew the face of a soiled wall. That cathedral looks as if built yesterday. True, if it should rain to-night, it would be badly streaked, but it can not rain, for
"To-morrow will be the happiest day of all the glad New-year;
To-morrow will be, of all the year, the maddest, merriest day;"
For Vera Cruz is joined to Mexico, and Lerdo comes this way.
This last line is not in Tennyson.
To-morrow came, but not the President. Every body dressed himself in his best: the streets were trimmed with lanterns; a green pavilion was arranged at the station; but he came not. Announced at ten, re-announced at five, the soldiers marched down the streets, all colors, officers and privates, and all mixed together, just as they ought to be in the United States. The people fill the balconies, house-tops, and walls. The boys jeer, and hoot, and whistle, as if they were Yankees. Still he comes not.
Somebody drops a real in the passage-way, kept open for him by the soldiers, and a bit of a black boy, very pretty and very prettily dressed, is pushed out for it by older boys, white and olive, who dare not risk the attempt themselves. A soldier holds him back. His mother, a bright, comely lady, stands behind him, watching him with mingled fear and admiration. She is afraid those olive-colored gamins, of fourteen years or thereabouts, full of roguery and rascality, will burn her boy's fingers in pulling that most desirable silver chestnut out of the martial fire.
While all, officers, soldiers, lads, and loungers, are intent on that shining mark, a bright boy, dirty and brown, in the employ of the street lamp-lighters, comes down the path to help locate some temporary lamp-posts, sees the real, catches it, and is off, amidst the laugh of the crowd. So the successful man is often the last on the field of conflict.
It grows dark, and we give it up, and so do many others. At eight he comes, but nobody sees him, and Vera Cruz has spent a day in waiting, and spent it in vain. The sound of the vesper bells floats sadly into my ears, as I write close under the towers of the Cortez Cathedral. How long before more Christian bells shall sweetly summon more Christian disciples to a more Christian worship? How long?
The opening for Christian work is not surpassed by that of any city. It should be taken possession of by the true Church of the True Cross. The foreign element alone would make a large congregation. They can all understand English. The natives are horribly neglected, and would respond to earnest missionary effort. It is the sea-port of the country, and many sailors visit it. The danger from yellow fever is not great. Gentlemen who had resided there fifteen years laughed at the fear of strangers. It is certainly no greater for ministers than for merchants. It is a good centre of influence and departure. It should be speedily occupied. Let Cortez's dream be fully answered, and Vera Cruz preach and practice the perfect gospel of Christ crucified.