In the Footprints of the Padres

-land a hundred feet or more above the sea; it is a hundred miles in length and forty-five in width. Our track lay diagonally across it, a stretch of eighty miles

s the Isthmus and were shortly to embark for San Francisco. I fear we children regretted the fact. Our life for three days had been like a veritable "Jungle Book." It almost out-Kiplinged K

rcrowded barge was swamped at Virgin Bay and four and twenty passengers were drowned. The "Transit Company," supposed to be responsible for the life and safety of each one

ldren were relegated to the wagons, and were there huddled together like so much live stock destined for the market. The men scrambled and even fought for the diminutive donkeys that were to bear them over the mountain pass. A circus knows no comedy like ours on that occasion. It is true we had but twelve miles to t

cupants, for they landed as lightly as if on feather-beds. From that hour our hearts were in our throats. Even the thatched lodges of the natives, swarming with bare brown babies, and often having t

westward over groves of bread-fruit trees and fixed fountains of feathery bamboo, over palms that towered like plumes in space and made silhouettes against the sky, we saw a long, level line of blue-as blue and bluer than the sky itself,-a

net "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer,

ke some watche

lanet swims

Cortez when wi

the Pacific,-

h other with

on a peak

y; for we were looking for the first time upon a sea that was to us as good as undiscovered, and we were shortly

d by mountains. It had no street, unless the sea sands it fronted upon could be called such. It had no church, no school, no public buildings

are the scavengers of the tropics. They sit upon the housetop and among the branches of the trees, awaiting the hour when the refuse of the domestic meal is thrown into the street. There is no drainage in those villages; strange to say, even in the larger cities there is none. Offal of every description is cast forth into the highways and byways; and at that

e as delicately fashioned and as variously tinted as flowers. All that they lacked was fragrance; and this we realized as we stored them ca

and adventure. On the San Juan river we had again and again touched points along the varying routes proposed, by the Maritime Canal Company of Nicaragua and the Walker Commission, a

and near its mouth is ribbed with sand-bars. For seventy miles the lake is navigable for vessels of the heaviest draught. Beyond the lake there must be a clean-cut over or through the mountains to the Pacific, and here six locks are reckoned sufficient. Cross-cuts from one bend in the river to another c

though it is to vary in width. The dimensions of the proposed canal, as recommended by the Walker Government Commission, are as follows: total length, one hundred and eighty-nine miles; minimum depth of water at all

tal cost, the several estimates ranging from one hundred and eighteen million to one hundred and thirty-five million dollars. The United States Congress at its last s

ome in a house as out of it; indeed, the houses are never free of them. They sailed up the river with us, and crossed the lake in our company, and sat by the mountain wayside awaiting our arrival; for

me and distance, and therefore a saving in fuel and provender; or if our ship, the John L. Stevens, was thought to be overloaded and unsafe, and was kept within easy reach of shore for fear of accident. We steamed for two weeks bet

can port on the Pacific. It was an amphitheatre dotted with twinkling lights. Our ship was speedily surrounded by small boats of all descriptions, wherein sat merchants noisily calling upon us to purchase their wares. They had abundant fruits, shells, corals, curios. They flashed t

he Pacific coast; one season is damper than the other, that is the only difference. The coast grew bare and bleak; the wind freshened and we were glad to put on our wraps. And then at last, after a journey of nearly five thousand miles, we slowed up in a fog so dense it dr

t at the