So he was really going home at last!  He had been gone five and a half years—­eventful, adventurous years that had made him over completely, at least so far as ambitions and equipment were concerned.  He had came away, in his early manhood, a printer and a pilot, unknown outside of his class.  He was returning a man of thirty-one, with a fund of hard experience, three added professions—­mining, journalism, and lecturing —­also with a new name, already famous on the sunset slopes of its adoption, and beginning to be heard over the hills and far away.  In some degree, at least, he resembled the prince of a fairy tale who, starting out humble and unnoticed, wins his way through a hundred adventures and returns with gifts and honors.

The homeward voyage was a notable one.  It began with a tempest a little way out of San Francisco—­a storm terrible but brief, that brought the passengers from their berths to the deck, and for a time set them praying.  Then there was Captain Ned Wakeman, a big, burly, fearless sailor, who had visited the edges of all continents and archipelagos; who had been born at sea, and never had a day’s schooling in his life, but knew the Bible by heart; who was full of human nature and profanity, and believed he was the only man on the globe who knew the secret of the Bible miracles.  He became a distinct personality in Mark Twain’s work —­the memory of him was an unfailing delight.  Captain “Ned Blakely,” in ‘Roughing It’, who with his own hands hanged Bill Noakes, after reading him promiscuous chapters from the Bible, was Captain Wakeman.  Captain “Stormfield,” who had the marvelous visit to heaven, was likewise Captain Wakeman; and he appears in the “Idle Excursion” and elsewhere.

Another event of the voyage was crossing the Nicaragua Isthmus—­the trip across the lake and down the San Juan River—­a, brand-new experience, between shores of splendid tropic tangle, gleaming with vivid life.  The luxuriance got into his note-book.

Dark grottos, fairy festoons, tunnels, temples, columns, pillars, towers, pilasters, terraces, pyramids, mounds, domes, walls, in endless confusion of vine-work—­no shape known to architecture unimitated—­and all so webbed together that short distances within are only gained by glimpses.  Monkeys here and there; birds warbling; gorgeous plumaged birds on the wing; Paradise itself, the imperial realm of beauty-nothing to wish for to make it perfect.

But it was beyond the isthmus that the voyage loomed into proportions somber and terrible.  The vessel they took there, the San Francisco, sailed from Greytown January 1, 1867, the beginning of a memorable year in Mark Twain’s life.  Next day two cases of Asiatic cholera were reported in the steerage.  There had been a rumor of it in Nicaragua, but no one expected it on the ship.