Viva Mexico!

Books by Charles M. Flandrau VIVA MEXICO! 16mo. Cloth, $1.25 net PREJUDICES 16mo. Cloth, $1.25 net THE DIARY OF A FRESHMAN 12mo. Cloth, 75 cents net D. APPLETON AND COMPANY NEW YORK
By CHARLES MACOMB FLANDRAU Author of “Harvard Episodes,” “The Diary of a Freshman,” etc.
NEW YORK AND LONDON D. APPLETON AND COMPANY 1912 Copyright, 1908, by D. APPLETON AND COMPANY Published September, 1908 Printed in the United States of America TO DON GUILLERMO OF THE FINCA DE SANTA MARGARITA For permission to reprint the chapters of this book that originally appeared in The Bellman , I beg to thank the editor.
C. M. F.
VIVA MEXICO!
NEITHER tourists nor persons of fashion seem to have discovered that the trip by water from New York to Vera Cruz is both interesting and agreeable. But perhaps to tourists and persons of fashion it wouldn’t be. For, although the former enjoy having traveled, they rarely enjoy traveling, and the travels of the latter would be pointless, as a rule, if they failed to involve the constant hope of social activity and its occasional fulfillment. By tourists I mean—and without disparagement of at least their preference—persons who prefer to visit a country in bands of from fifteen to five hundred rather than in a manner less expeditionary; and persons of fashion I am able even more accurately to define to my own satisfaction by saying they are the kind of persons to whom the wives of American ambassadors in Europe are polite. Probably to neither of these globe-trotting but alien classes would the voyage from New York to Vera Cruz appeal. For the tourist it is too slow and long. There are whole days when there is nothing for the man in charge of him to expound through his megaphone; whole days when there is nothing to do but contemplate a cloudless sky and a semitropical sea. Thoroughly to delight in the protracted contemplation of such spacious blueness overhead and of so much placid green water underneath, one must be either very lazy or very contemplative. Tourists, of course, are neither, and while persons of fashion are sometimes both, they are given to contemplating the beauties of nature from points of vantage favorable also to the contemplation of one another.