The fine steamer that the enterprise of Mr. Hollenbeck had placed on the lake, and which he had named the "Elizabeth" after his amiable wife, had been wrecked a short time before I left the country, and Mr. Hollenbeck's own health had greatly suffered by the labours he undertook in endeavouring to get the vessel off the sunken rock on which it had struck. Notwithstanding this and other misfortunes, enough to try a man's mettle to its foundation, his native pluck carried him through all his difficulties, and he was away to the States to get new vessels and blow another blast at fortune's iron gates. Whilst I write these last few pages I learn that a new steamer ploughs the lake, and that his transit service is again in complete working order. Success attend him.
The result of the wreck of the "Elizabeth", so far as I was concerned, was that I had to take a passage down the lake to San Carlos in a bungo packet, so full as to necessitate closer acquaintanceship with many amiable Nicaraguans than was agreeable to my insular prejudices. When in the middle of the night an old woman tried to roll me off the soft plank I had found for myself into a litter of crying babies, I indulged in some bitter reflections on the race, that, I am happy to say, were as transitory as the inconvenience to which I was put. At San Carlos we changed to the river steamer under my old friend Captain Birdsall. As I have already described the scenery of the San Juan in the account of my journey up, I shall not repeat the story, but simply state that we reached Greytown on the 11th September, and on the 16th embarked on the West Indian Mail Packet. I arrived in England within a month, to find my native town (Newcastle) wealthier and dirtier than ever, with thousands of furnaces belching out smoke and poisonous gases; to find the people of England fretting about the probable exhaustion of her coal-fields in a few hundred years, actually dreading the time when she will no longer be the smithy of the world, but the centre of the science, philosophy, literature, and art of the Anglo-Saxon race—that race whose sons all over the globe will then look up to her with loving reverence as the mother of nations, the coloniser of the world, the pioneer of freedom, progress, and morality.
INDEX.
Acacias.
Acarus.
Acclimature.
Achras sapota.
Acoyapo.
Acrocinus longimanus.
Adiantum.