We were eight in the coach, which was drawn by as many mules—­four merchants, two priests, myself and the lady who afterwards became my wife.  She was a blue-eyed and fair-haired American from New York.  Her name, I soon discovered, was Emma Becker, and her father, who was dead, had been a lawyer.  We made friends at once, and before we had jolted ten miles on our journey I learned her story.  It seemed that she was an orphan with a very small fortune, and only one near relative, an aunt who had married a Mexican named Gomez, the owner of a fine range or hacienda situated on the border of the highlands, about eighty miles from the City of Mexico.  On the death of her father, being like most American girls adventurous and independent, Miss Becker had accepted an invitation from her aunt Gomez and her husband to come and live with them a while.  Now, quite alone and unescorted, she was on her way to Mexico City, where she expected to be met by some friends of her uncle.

We started from Vera Cruz about mid-day and slept, or rather passed the night, at a filthy inn alive with every sort of insect pest.  Two hours before dawn we were bundled into the diligencia and slowly dragged up a mountain road so steep that, notwithstanding the blows and oaths of the drivers, the mules had to stop every few hundred yards to rest.  I remember that at last I fell asleep, my head reposing on the shoulder of a very fat priest, who snored tempestuously, then awoke to pray, then snored again.  It was the voice of Miss Becker, who sat opposite to me, that wakened me.

“Forgive me for disturbing you, Dr. Therne,” she said, “but you really must look,” and she pointed through the window of the coach.

Following her hand I saw a sight which no one who has witnessed it can ever forget:  the sun rising on the mighty peak of Orizaba, the Star Mountain, as the old Aztecs named it.  Eighteen thousand feet above our heads towered the great volcano, its foot clothed with forests, its cone dusted with snow.  The green flanks of the peak and the country beneath them were still wrapped in shadow, but on its white and lofty crest already the lights of dawn were burning.  Never have I seen anything more beautiful than this soaring mountain top flaming like some giant torch over a world of darkness; indeed, the unearthly grandeur of the sight amazed and half paralysed my mind.

A lantern swung from the roof of the coach, and, turning my eyes from the mountain, in its light I saw the face of my travelling companion and—­fell in love with it.  I had seen it before without any such idea entering my mind; then it had been to me only the face of a rather piquante and pretty girl, but with this strange and inconvenient result, the sight of the dawn breaking upon Orizaba seemed to have worked some change in me.  At least, if only for an instant, it had pierced the barrier that day by day we build within us to protect ourselves from the attack of the impulses of nature.