my adieux to San Francisco and the hospitable San Franciscans with regret.
On the 15th of November, the Golden Age, Commodore Watkins, steamed out of the Golden Gates, bearing on board, among some 520 souls, the body that now addresses the public. She was a model steamer, with engines and engine-rooms clean as a club kitchen, and a cuisine whose terrapin soup and deviled crabs à la Baltimore will long maintain their position in my memory—not so long, however, as the kindness and courtesy of the ancient mariner who commanded the Golden Age. On the 28th we spent the best part of a night at Acapulco, the city of Cortez and of Doña Marina, where any lurking project of passing through ill-conditioned Mexico was finally dispelled. The route from Acapulco to Vera Cruz, over a once well-worn highway, was simply and absolutely impassable. Each sovereign and independent state in that miserable caricature of the Anglo-American federal Union was at daggers drawn with all and every of its next-door neighbors; the battles were paper battles, but the plundering and the barbarities—cosas de Mejico!—were stern realities. A rich man could not travel because of the banditti; a poor man would have been enlisted almost outside the city gates; a man with many servants would have seen half of them converted to soldiers under his eyes, and have lost the other half by desertion, while a man without servants would have been himself press-gang'd; a Liberal would have been murdered by the Church, and a Churchman—even the frock is no protection—would have been martyred by the Liberal party. For this disappointment I found a philosophical consolation in various experiments touching the influence of Mezcal brandy, the Mexican national drink, upon the human mind and body.
On the 15th of December we debarked at Panama; horridly wet, dull, and dirty was the "place of fish," and the "Aspinwall House" and its Mivart reminded me of a Parsee hotel in the fort, Bombay. Yet I managed to spend there three pleasant circlings of the sun. A visit to the acting consul introduced me to M. Hurtado, the Intendente or military governor, and to a charming countrywoman, whose fascinating society made me regret that my stay there could not be protracted. Though politics were running high, I became acquainted with most of the officers of the United States squadron, and only saw the last of them at Colon, alias Aspinwall. Messrs. Boyd and Power, of the "Weekly Star and Herald," introduced me to the officials of the Panama Railroad, Messrs. Nelson, Center, and others, who, had I not expressed an aversion to "dead-headism," or gratis traveling, would have offered me a free passage. Last, but not least, I must mention the venerable name of Mrs. Seacole, of Jamaica and Balaklava.
On the 8th of December I passed over the celebrated Panama Railway to Aspinwall, where Mr. Center, the superintendent of
