At the city-gate stands a sentry—­the strangest thing I ever saw in the guise of a soldier—­a brown Indian of the coast, dressed in some rags that were a uniform once, shoeless, filthy in the extreme, and armed with an amazing old flint-lock.  He is bad enough to look at, in all conscience, and really worse than he looks, for—­no doubt—­he has been pressed into the service against his will, and hates white men and their ways with all his heart.  Of course he will run away when he gets a chance; and, though he will be no great loss to the service, he will add his mite to the feeling of hatred that has been growing up for these so many years among the brown Indians against the whites and the half-cast Mexicans.  But more of this hereafter.

One step outside the gate, and we are among the sand-hills that stretch for miles and miles round Vera Cruz.  They are mere shifting sand-mounds; and, though some of them are fifty feet high, the fierce north wind moves them about bodily.  The Texans know these winds well, and call them “northers.”  They come from Hudson’s Bay to the Gulf of Mexico, right down the Continent of North America, over a level plain with hardly a hill to obstruct their course, the Rocky Mountains and the Alleghanies forming a sort of trough for them.  When the “norte” blows fiercely you can hardly keep your feet in the streets of Vera Cruz, and vessels drag their anchors or break from their moorings in the ill-protected harbour, and are blown out to sea—­lucky if they escape the ugly coral-reefs and sand-banks that fringe the coast.  There are a few bushes growing outside the walls, and there we found the Nopal bush, the great prickly pear—­the same that has established itself all round the shores of the Mediterranean—­growing in crevices of rocks, and cracks in lava-beds, and barren places where nothing else will live.  But what made us notice these Nopals was, that they were covered with what looked like little white cocoons, out of which, when they were pressed, came a drop of deep crimson fluid.  This is the cochineal insect, but only the wild variety; the fine kind, which is used for dye, and conies from the province of Oajaca, miles off, is covered only with a mealy powder.  There the Indians cultivate great plantations of Nopals, and spread the insects over them with immense care, even removing them, and carrying them up into the mountains in baskets when the rainy season begins in the plains, and bringing them back when it is over.

On Friday, the 14th of March, at three o’clock in the morning, we took our places in a strong American-built diligence, holding nine inside, and began our journey by being dragged along the railroad—­which was commenced with great energy some time ago, and got fifteen miles on its way to the capital, at which point it has stopped ever since.  When day broke we had left the railroad, and were jolting along through a parched sandy plain, thinly covered with acacias, nopals, and other kinds of cactus, bignonias, and