ing their minds and toning their hearts to new
sensibiUties.
With as Httle delay as possible our passengers handed their baggage to the packers, hired saddle- mules, paying from ten to twenty dollars for a beast to Panama, and mounting, filed off into the narrow path that marked the way. Some of the women donned man's apparel, and rode man-wise; others accepted a compromise, and followed Mrs Amelia Bloomer, who cut off her skirts and paraded the streets of New York in short clothes first in 1849, just in time for the California-going sisterhood to adopt that costume on the Isthmus ; others refused in any wise to molest the sacred limits of their petticoats, prefer- ring to die rather than to outrage modesty, shame the sex, and exhibit their large ankles even to the barbarians, among whom he who wore the least cloth- ing was most in fashion, nakedness absolute being full dress. Children were seated in chairs strapped to the backs of natives ; luggage was also carried lashed to the backs of porters. For so supposedly enervating a climate, the loads these natives, negroes and mongrels, are capable of carrying is surprising. I was told that some of them frequently packed on their backs 250 pounds from Gorgona to Panamd, twenty-five miles, in a day and a half Many of the passengers engaged these men to carry their effects, and made the journe}'" with them on foot.
There was no wagon road across the Isthmus, and the trail from Gorgona, though not so broken as that from Cruces, was rough in the extreme, and led through a greatly diversified country. Two miles brought us across the table land, when we entered a dense forest, from which the sun was wholly excluded by the overhanging branches. Thence we followed the path successively over soft, uneven ground, through shady canons, and mountain chasms murky in their gloomy solitude, up and round precipitous hillsides cut by travel into steps and stairs, on w
