Having landed in safety, in spite of the negligence of the “Transit Company,” our next move was to secure some means of transportation over the mountain and down to San Juan del Sur.  We were each provided with a ticket calling for a seat in the saddle or on a bench in a springless wagon.  Naturally, the women and children 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 traverse, and some of these were level; but by and by the road dipped and climbed and swerved and plunged into the depths, only to soar again along the giddy verge of some precipice that overhung a fathomless abyss.  That is how it seemed to us as we clung to the hard benches of our wagon with its four-mule attachment.

Once a wagon just ahead of us, having refused to answer to its brakes, went rushing down a fearful grade and was hurled into a tangle of underbrush,—­which is doubtless what saved the lives of its occupants, 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 tame monkeys and parrots in the doorways, could not beguile us; nor all the fruits, were they never so tempting; nor the flowers, though they were past belief for size and shape and color and perfume.

Over the shining heights the wind scudded, behatting many a head that went bare thereafter.  Out of the gorges ascended the voice of the waters, dashing noisily but invisibly on their joyous way to the sea.  From one of those heights, looking 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,—­and we knew it was the Pacific!  We were little fellows in those days, we children; yet I fancy that we felt not unlike Balboa when we knelt upon that peak in Darien and thanked God that he had the glory of discovering a new and unnamed ocean.

Why, I wonder, did Keats, in his famous sonnet “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” make his historical mistake when he sang—­

    Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
      When a new planet swims into his ken;
    Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes,
      He stared at the Pacific,—­and all his men
    Looked at each other with a wild surmise—­
      Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

It mattered not to us whether our name was Cortez or Balboa.  With any other name we would have been just as jolly; for we were looking for the first time upon a sea that was to us as good as undiscovered, and we were shortly to brave it in a vessel bound for the Golden Gate.  At our time of life that smacked a little of circumnavigation.