inexperience of my pen, bear in mind, I pray you, that I am but a
musician, and only a pianist at that.

* * * * *

_January, 1862._ Once more in New York, after an absence of six
years!--Six years madly squandered, scattered to the winds, as if life
were infinite, and youth--eternal! Six years, in the space of which I
have wandered at random beneath the blue skies of the tropics, yielding
myself up indolently to the caprice of Fortune, giving a concert
wherever I happened to find a piano, sleeping wherever night overtook
me, on the green grass of the savanna, or under the palm-leafed roof of
a _veguero_, who shared with me his corn-_tortilla_, coffee, and
bananas, and thought himself amply renumerated, when, at dawn, I took my
departure with a "_Dios se lo pague a V._" (May God reward you!) to
which he responded by a "_Vaya V. con Dios!_" (God be with you!)--these
two formulae constituting, in such unsophisticated countries, the entire
operation, so ingeniously perfected by civilized nations, which
generally is known by the name of "settling the hotel-bill." And when at
last I became weary of the same horizon, I crossed an arm of the sea,
and landed on some neighboring isle, or on the Spanish Main. Thus, in
succession, I have visited all the Antilles,--Spanish, French, English,
Dutch, Swedish, Danish; the Guianas, and the coasts of Para. At times,
having become the idol of some obscure _pueblo_, whose untutored ears I
had charmed with its own simple ballads, I would pitch my tent for five,
six, eight months, deferring my departure from day to day, until finally
I began seriously to entertain the idea of remaining there forevermore.
Abandoning myself to such influences, I lived without care, as the bird
sings, as the flower expands, as the brook flows, oblivious of the past,
reckless of the future, and sowed both my heart and my purse with the
ardor of a husbandman who hopes to reap a hundred ears for every grain
he confides to the earth. But, alas! the fields, where is garnered the
harvest of expended doubloons, and where vernal loves bloom anew, are
yet to be discovered; and the result of my double prodigality was, that
one fine morning I found myself a bankrupt in heart, with my purse at
ebb-tide.

Suddenly disgusted with the world and with myself, weary, discouraged,
mistrusting men, (ay, and women, too,) I fled to a desert on the extinct
volcano of M----, where, for several months