sword-fish, monstrous, sinister, moved slothfully in the viscid waters. From scrubby growth on the banks a hundred or a hundred thousand crows had much ado with rebuking the invaders of their solitude.

Next, clusters of thatch roofs appeared, and in an hour the party from the Impératrice Eugénie gained the wharf of the port. The sailors managed to steer through a tangle of shipping and dugout scows, the latter heaped high with fruits and flowers of many colors, or hides or fish of many aromas. Before the small boat could touch the worm-eaten quay, Jacqueline had poised herself on its edge, caught her skirts, and hopped lightly over the 12 stretch of water yet remaining. Then she gazed curiously around on Mexico.

And Mexico was there in various forms to greet her, though in no form animated. Sluggish creatures under peaked sombreros of muddied straw seemed to be growing against the foreground of wharf and dingy warehouses, and fastened to the background of sallow blazing streets and sallow reflecting walls there were still the same human barnacles. But no creature seemed ever to move. They all looked a part of the decay, of putrefying vegetable and flesh and fish everywhere, which grew so rank in life that in death their rotting could never keep pace.

A lazy town stretched up a lazy street. On a hill farther up the river a fortress basked in peace, and had no desire to be disturbed. In the town the buildings were of warped timber, and a few of stone. Parasitic tumors, like loathsome black ulcers, swelled abundantly on the roofs. They were the buzzards, the only form of life held sacred. To clean up nature’s and man’s spendthrift killing was a blessed service in Tampico. It saved exertion.

A strange region, by all odds! But at least one could walk thereon, and Jacqueline thought it droll. An outlandish corner of the earth such as this was something never experienced before. But as to that, the outlandish corner might have said the same about Jacqueline. Men stared like dazed sheep on the astounding apparition of a lady. Some among them were entirely clothed, in sun-yellowed white. There was a merchant or so, a coffee exporter or so, a ranchero or so, and hacendados from the interior. But they were all hard, typical, and often darkly scowling, which seemed an habitual expression inspired by the thought of a foreign Hapsburg emperor so mighty and proud, far off in their capital. There was not an officer among them; nor, quite likely, a gentleman. Never a bit of red was to be seen from the garrison on the hill. The French 13invaders up there, with pardonable taste, kept to themselves. Their policing ended with the smothering of revolt. So against the stain of tainted mankind, the vision of delicate femininity contrasted as a fleck of spotless white on a besmeared palette. But crows, scavengers, men, they were all so many “creatures” to Jacqueline–the setting of a very novel scene, and she would not have had it otherwise.

She turned to her maid, who shrank hesitating in the boat. “Berthe, you pitiful little ninny, are you coming? Then do, and do not forget the satchel.” For a promenade of an hour the inhabitants of two imperial courts must needs have a satchel, filled of course with mysteries of the toilet. The maid obeyed, and followed her mistress up the lazy ascending street. They passed through the Alameda of dense cypresses, an inky blot as on glaring manila paper, while the shade overhead was profane with jackdaws. The lady tripped on, and into the street again. Ney and a sailor hurried to overtake her. The other sailors meantime went on their errand for fresh meat, but Michel had said to the steward in charge, “If there should be any need, I’ll send this man to you. Then you come, all of you, quick!”

Jacqueline pushed on her voyage of discovery, and her retinue trooped behind, single file, over the narrow, burning sidewalks of patched