we succeed in getting several
unusually grotesque and dreadful pictures. If anything could cure one
person's sentimental regard for another, it would be the sight of just
such amateur caricatures as were turned out that afternoon. Mrs.
Steele looks a little like her handsome self in the proofs shown us
next day. Miss Rogers develops an unflattering likeness to a dutch
doll--I am as black as a Congo negro and wear the scowl of a brigand,
while Baron de Bach, after carefully brushing his hair and twirling
his moustache to the proper curve, comes out with a white blot
instead of a face; a suggestion of one eye peers shyly forth from the
moon-like mask, and the Peruvian is greatly disgusted. I shall ever
regard an amateur's camera as a great moral engine for the extirpation
of personal vanity.

On the evening of the eighth day we steam into the far-famed Bay of
Acapulco.

It is sunset, and from the Captain's bridge we watch the headlands
taking bolder shape against the brilliant sky, the lighthouse flushing
pink in the reflection. We see the long, low red-roofed Lazaretto set
peacefully among the hills, and away to the right the straggling town
of Acapulco, fringed with cocoa palms and guarded on the other side
by an old and primitive fort.

A wonderful land-locked harbour is Acapulco, and the bold hills
circling it seemed that night to shut it out from all the rest of the
world.

"That town is more like old Spain than Spain herself," I hear a
gentleman from Madrid say to Mrs. Steele. "It has remained since
Cortes' day, with no other land communication than an occasional mule
train affords; and the manners and customs and speech of Cortes'
followers are preserved there to-day."

"Can't we go ashore?" I ask the Captain, pleadingly.

"Well, you can't stay long," is the gruff answer. "We must get away
early to-morrow morning."

But Baron de Bach, overhearing, says:

"I tell Madame Steele ve can haf supper in dthe town. Vill you come,
Senorita?"

"Thanks, with pleasure, if Mrs. Steele agrees," and my spirits rise
high at the prospect.

The great red sun rests one splendid moment on the wooded heights and
dyes the waters of Acapulco's bay in dusky carmine, and it throws into
bolder silhouette the black hull of the disabled man-of-war _Alaska_,
anchored after many storms in this fair and quiet haven. The health
commissioners are long in coming, and it is late before Mrs. Steele,
the Baron and I are pushed off from