A GALA TRIP THROUGH MEXICO.
CHAPTER I.
FROM SAN FRANCISCO TO COLIMA.
GLORIOUSLY beautiful was that bright morning of the 30th day of September, 1869, when I reluctantly left the darkened chamber in which lay the mortal remains of a brave man, and true champion of freedom, my friend of many years, Señor Don Jose A. Godoy. the Consul of Mexico, who had fallen dead while attending the last reception of Mr. Seward on the evening previous, and bidding farewell to his stricken family, hurried on board the Pacific Mail Steamship Co's magnificent steamer Golden City, which was lying at her berth in San Francisco, with steam up, ready to bear us away to the tropics.
Blue and clear was the sky above us, calm and mirror like the surface of the broad Bay of San Francisco, soft as velvet in all their outlines, the brown, grey, and mauve-tinted mountains which surround it, when seen through the purple haze of Autumn which enveloped city and village, hill, mountain, island, fortress, and inland sea, alike in its tender and loving embrace. When I come again from beyond the snowy mountains, and the shores of another ocean, a change will have come over all the fair scene, and hill and valley, moun-
