tobacco, the banana, itself perhaps the most prolific and
nourishing of all plants, and which, on the space where Indian corn
would sustain but three human lives, will nourish with its free bounty
more than fifty. A few miles more, and you stand on that great plateau,
elevated with but little variation six or seven thousand feet above the
level of the sea, and stretching on every side we know not over how many
hundred thousands of square miles. There, under the tropics and beneath
a tropical sun, is a temperate atmosphere, cool, salubrious, and
bracing. There, almost within sight of the deadly miasma of the coast,
is a new climate, which deals kindly even with a European constitution.
There all the great cereals of the North, the wheat, the barley, the
corn, come to their most luxuriant perfection. And so it is literally
true, that, travelling a few hundred miles from Gulf to Ocean, you pass
through more climates and see a wider variety of vegetation than if you
traversed our whole country from the great lakes in the North to the
southernmost cape of Florida. Nay, so striking is this contact of the
zones, that in that table-land itself are, it is said, deep valleys,
where with one glance the eye may behold far up the deep shades of the
pine, while below waves the feathery grace of the palm,--or where one
may walk amid familiar waving grain, and see beneath him, descending in
beautiful gradation, the corn, the olive, the sugar-cane, down to depths
where a torrid clime lavishes its full wealth of verdure.

Here, too, is the true Ophir; here, the rivers that roll down their
yellow sands. For here are the veins of gold that attracted the Spaniard
with his fatal greed, and the mines of silver that for three hundred
years have been yielding untold treasures, and to-day are as ready as
ever to yield untold treasures more. With such germs of wealth hidden in
her soil, what was needed to make Mexico one of the master-nations but
men? What, to crowd her ports with ships, to make her borders pleasant
with the hum of industry, and to fill her storehouses with its products,
but the same sagacity and energy which have made the sterile hills of
New England populous, and which are now transforming the prairies of the
West into one broad cornfield? Was it surprising, then, that fifty years
ago men were dreaming great things of Mexico?

And it will not be denied that into men's estimate of her future some
elements of romance entered, to