long, level line of blue--as blue and bluer than the sky itself,--and we
knew it was the Pacific! We were little fellows in those days, we
children; yet I fancy that we felt not unlike Balboa when we knelt upon
that peak in Darien and thanked God that he had the glory of discovering
a new and unnamed ocean.

Why, I wonder, did Keats, in his famous sonnet "On First Looking into
Chapman's Homer," make his historical mistake when he sang--

Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout _Cortez_ when with eagle eyes,
He stared at the Pacific,--and all his men
Looked at each other with a wild surmise--
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

It mattered not to us whether our name was Cortez or Balboa. With any
other name we would have been just as jolly; for we were looking for the
first time upon a sea that was to us as good as undiscovered, and we
were shortly to brave it in a vessel bound for the Golden Gate. At our
time of life that smacked a little of circumnavigation.

San Juan del Sur! It was scarcely to be called a village,--a mere
handful of huts scattered upon the shore of a small bay and almost
surrounded by mountains. It had no street, unless the sea sands it
fronted upon could be called such. It had no church, no school, no
public buildings. Its hotels were barns where the gold-seekers were fed
without ceremony on beans and hardtack. Fruits were plentiful, and that
was fortunate.