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 can be constructed at the rate of two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, or less, per mile.  The canal must be sunk or raised at intervals; there will, therefore, at various points be the need of a wall of great strength and durability, from one hundred and thirty to three hundred feet in height or depth.

The annual rain-fall in the river region between Lake Nicaragua and the Caribbean Sea is twenty feet; annual evaporation, three feet.  These points must be considered in the construction and feeding of the canal, even 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 stages, thirty feet; width, one hundred feet in rock-cuts, elsewhere varying from one hundred and fifty to three hundred feet—­except in Lake Nicaragua, where one end of the channel will be made six hundred feet wide.

Nearly fifty years ago, when a canal was projected, the Childs survey set the cost at thirty-seven million dollars.  Now the commissioners differ on the question of total 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 session authorized the expenditure of one million by a new commission “to investigate the merits of all suggested locations and develop a project for an Isthmus Canal.”

And so we left the land of the lizard.  What wonders they are!  From an inch to two feet in length, slim, slippery, and of many and changeful colors, they literally inhabit the land, and are as much at home 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 they are curious and sociable little beasts.  As for the San Juan river, ’tis like the Ocklawaha of Florida many times multiplied, and with all its original attractions in a state of perfect preservation.

All the way up the coast we literally hugged the shore; only during the hours when we were crossing the yawning mouth of the Gulf of California were we for a single moment out of sight of land.  I know not if this was a saving in time 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 between a landscape and a seascape that afforded constant diversion.  At night we sometimes saw flame-tipped volcanoes; there was ever the undulating outline of the Sierra Nevada Mountains through Central America, Mexico, and California.