Identifier: oldmexicoherlost1883bish (find matches)
Title: Old Mexico and her lost provinces; a journey in Mexico, southern California, and Arizona, by way of Cuba
Year: 1883 (1880s)
Authors: Bishop, William Henry, 1847-1928
Subjects: Mexico -- Description and travel California -- Description and travel Arizona -- Description and travel
Publisher: New York, Harper & brothers
Contributing Library: Brown University Library
Digitizing Sponsor: Brown University

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to this dense NewYork, with its tall towers and mansards and fairy-likebridge, from the other side of the world. This journeylengthened out into a long, desultory ramble, beginningwith Cuba, and, after Mexico, concluding with the mostremote, novel, and characteristic of our own possessionson the Pacific slope. There is unity of subject, and evena certain pathos, in the recollection that this latter wasonce Mexican territory also. Its most obvious basis oflife is still Spanish, and it may be sentimentally consid-ered a kind of Alsace-Lorraine—a part of the sister re-public when it was well-nigh as large and powerful asourselves. It was naturally cold on the 31st day of March, andblustering weather followed us down the coast as faras it dared. Then I awoke one morning early, at the BY WAY OF CUBA AND THE SPANISH MAIN. 5 warm gleam of summer in the yellow lattices of my cabinwindow, and, looking out, saw that we were voyaging, onan even keel, on the placid blue sea of the tropics. Fra-
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grant odors were wafted over to us from Florida, thoughwe did not see the land. The Pan of Matanzas came insight, and we studied the long, bold outline of the islandof Cuba. It was the Spanish Main. It was the perfec-tion of weather for piracy. If the long, low, suspicious- 6 OLD MEXICO AND HER LOST PROVINCES. looking craft, with raking masts, which used to steal outfrom sheltered covers to plunder rich galleons, had manysuch days for their occupation, it was, so far at least, anenviable one. We had on board a Cuban w^ho had married a Connect-icut wife, and lived so long in a Connecticut village thathe had a kind of Connecticut accent himself, and he wastaking his wife to see his family, where, no doubt, muchastonishment awaited her. The captain, a merry and entertaining soul, had prom-ised us, for our last days dinner, a baked ice-cream. Heendeavored to get up bets on the improbability of hisbeing able to accomplish it; but there, sure enough, itwas, and doubters were put to scorn. T

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