.200 THE VOYAGE TO CALIFORNIA.
women, and children of all classes, black, white, and mulatto, and herded like cattle without privacy or restraint, without rooms or berths. Thus were the tired travellers kept for two or three days and as many sickening sleepless nights; the decent and re- fined portion continually hearing the vile language of the obscene and blasphemous.
Some there were, however, who could forget their discomforts, and lose themselves in the contemplation of nature's magnificence. Canopied by broad-topped trees, slender and white-limbed, with their bright foliage fluttering like spangles in the sunshine, by lofty palms whose tasselled branches bent gracefully over the banks down to the water's brim, passing Arcadian isles rich in tropical plants and perfumes, the frouzy boat with its confused cargo of panting gold-hunters, wound with the winding stream, round among snags, and shoals, and rapids, up and onward toward the empire of their gilded hopes.
Dark, deep-red lignum vitse and caoutchouc, bananas and plantains with their long smooth leaves, and scattering sugar-cane with high tasselled crests, shelter lovingly the mammoth red and yellow flowers that fringe the stream. Thousands of black, brown, and gray monkeys hold their conventions on both sides of the river, and make their exhibitions on the trees, leaping from limb to limb and catching and swinging themselves violently, suspended by the tail, grinning and chattering, and screaming in jubilant mocker}^ to the pitiful dirt-diggers, in whom they seem to recog- nize a degeneration of their own species. Surely they of the forest are fittest and will survive.
At an island eighteen miles from the bay, whose keeper had a small white neat board house and a garden, the steamboat stopped to wood.
Ascending the river, nature spreads out in broader and ever increasing sublimity. The foliage assumes statelier proportions ; the forests are grander, and the mountains higher. Pendant from the limbs of tall
