America is becoming, not English merely, but world-embracing in the variety of its type; and, as the English element has given language and history to that land, America offers the English race the moral directorship of the globe, by ruling mankind through Saxon institutions and the English tongue. Through America, England is speaking to the world.

PART II.

POLYNESIA

°

CHAPTER I.

PITCAIRN ISLAND.

PANAMA is a picturesque time-worn Spanish city, that rises abruptly from the sea in a confused pile of decaying bastions and decayed cathedrals, while a dense jungle of mangrove and bamboo threatens to bury it in rich greenery. The forest is filled with baboons and lizards of gigantic size, and is gay with the bright plumage of the toucans and macaws, while, within the walls, every housetop bears its living load of hideous turkeybuzzards, foul-winged and bloodshot-eyed.

It was the rainy season (which here, indeed, lasts for threequarters of the year), and each day was an alternation of shower-bath, and vapour-bath with sickly sun. On the first night of my stay, there was a lunar rainbow, which I went on to the roof of the hotel to watch. The misty sky was white with the reflected light of the hidden moon, which was obscured by an inky cloud that seemed a tunnel through the heavens. In a few minutes I was driven from my post by the tropical rain.

At the railway station, I parted from my Californian friends, who were bound for Aspinwall, and thence by steamer to New York. A stranger scene it has not often been my fortune to behold. There cannot have been less than a thousand natives, wearing enormous hats and little else, and selling everything, from linen suits to the last French novel. A tame jaguar, a pelican, parrots, monkeys, pearls, shells, flowers, green cocoanuts and turtles, mangoes and wild dogs, were among the things for sale. The station was guarded by the army of the Republic of New Granada, consisting of five officers, a bugler, a drummer, and nineteen rank and file. Six of the men wore

red trousers and dirty shirts for uniform; the rest dressed as they pleased, which was generally in Adamic fashion. Not even the officers had shoes; and of the men, one was a fullblood Indian, some ten were negroes, and the remainder nondescripts, but among them was, of course, an Irishman from Cork or Kilkenny. After the train had started, the troops formed, and marched briskly through the town, the drummer trotting along some twenty yards before the company, Frenchfashion, and beating the retraite. The French invalids from Acapulco, who were awaiting in Panama the arrival of an Imperial frigate at Aspinwall, stood in the streets to see the New Granadans pass, twirling their moustaches, and smiling grimly. One old drum-major, lean and worn with fever, turned to me, and, shrugging his shoulders, pointed to his side: the Granadans had their bayonets tied on with string.

Whether Panama will continue to hold its present position as the "gate of the Pacific" is somewhat doubtful: Nicaragua offers greater advantages to the English, Tehuantepec to the American traders. The Gulf of Panama and the ocean for a great distance to the westward from its mouth are notorious for their freedom from all breezes; the gulf lies, indeed, in the equatorial belt of calms, and sailing-vessels can never make much use of the port of Panama. Aspinwall or Colon, on the Atlantic side, has no true port whatever. As long, however, as the question is merely one of railroad and steamship traffic, Panama may hold its own against the other isthmus cities; but when the canal is cut, the selected spot should be one beyond the reach of calms-in Nicaragua or Mexico.

From Panama I sailed in one of the ships of the new Colonial Line, for Wellington, in New Zealand-the longest steam voyage in the world. Our course was to be a "great circle" to Pitcairn Island, and another great circle thence to Cape Palliser, near Wellington—a distance in all of some 6600 miles; but our actual course was nearer 7000. When off the Gallapagos Islands, we met the cold southerly wind and water, known as the Chilian current, and crossed the equator in a breeze which forced us all to wear great-coats, and to dream that, instead of entering the southern hemisphere, we had come by mistake within the arctic circle.