My late companion travelled up into the Northern States, went to the Indian assembly at Manitoulin Island, paid a visit to various tribes of Red Men in the Hudson’s Bay Territory—­as yet unmissionized, carried away in triumph the big medicine-drum I have already spoken of, and saw and did many other things not to be related here.  One sight that he saw, some months later, reminded him of the wild country where we had travelled together.  He was in Iowa City, a little town of a year or two’s growth, out in the prairie States of the Far West.  As he stood one morning in the outskirts, among the plank-houses and half-made roads, there came a solitary horseman riding in.  Evidently he had come from the Mexican frontier, a thousand miles and more away across the plains; and no doubt, his waggons and the rest of his party were behind him on the road, beyond the distant horizon of the prairie.  By his face he was American, but his costume was the dress of old Mexico, the leather jacket and trousers, the broad white hat and huge jingling spurs.  His lazo hung in front of his high-peaked saddle, and his well-worn serape was rolled up behind him like a trooper’s cloak.  As he approached the town, he spurred his jaded beast, who broke into the old familiar paso of the Mexican plains.  “It was my last sight of Mexico,” said my companion.  He saluted the horseman in Spanish, and the well-known words of welcome made the grim man’s haggard sunburnt features relax into a smile as he returned the salutation and rode on.

As for myself, my voyage home was short and unadventurous.  From Vera Cruz to Havana, most of my companions were Mexican refugees who had been turned out of the country for being mixed up with Haro’s revolution or Santa Ana’s intrigues.  They were showily got-up men, elaborately polite, and with much to say for themselves; but every now and then some casual remark showed what stuff they were made of, and I pitied more than ever the unfortunate countries whose political destinies depend on the intrigues of these adventurers.

In the hot land-locked bay of St. Thomas’s we, with the contents of eight or nine more steamers, were shifted into the great steamer bound homeward.  I went ashore with an old German gentleman, and walked about the streets.  St. Thomas’s is a Danish island, and a free port, that is, a smuggling depot for the rest of the West India islands, much as Gibraltar is for the Mediterranean.  It is a stifling place, full of mosquitos and yellow fever, and the confusion of tongues reigns there even more than in Gibraltar, for the blacks in the streets all speak three or four languages, and the shopkeepers six or seven.