ship _Euterpe_, off S. Catherine's Point, July 21, 1849. On the shelf
below the picture was a row of books. I never saw Pascoe look at them,
and they could have been like the bottles, retained by a careful man
because of the notion that some day they would come in handy. Once,
when waiting for Pascoe, who was out getting a little beer, I glanced
at the volumes, and supposed they bore some relation to the picture of
the ship; perhaps once they had been owned by that legendary brother of
Pascoe's, a sailor, of whom I had had a misty apprehension. It would
be difficult to say there had been a direct word about him. There were
manuals on navigation, seamanship, and ship-building, all of them
curiosities, in these later days, rather than expert guides. They were
full of marginal notes, and were not so dusty as I had expected to find
them. The rest of the books were of journeys in Central America and
Mexico: _Three Years in Guatemala_; _The Buried Cities of Yucatan_;
_Scenes on the Mosquito Coast_; _A Voyage to Honduras_. There was more
of it, and of that sort. They were by authors long forgotten; but
those books, too, looked as though they were often in use. Certainly
they could not be classed with the old glue-pots and the lumber.

It was long after my first visit to Pascoe that he referred to those
books. "Somebody told me," he said one evening, while offering me a
share of his beer, "that you have been to the American tropics."

I told him I could say I had been, but little more. I said it was a
very big world.

"Yes," he said, after a pause: "and what a world. Think of those
buried cities in Yucatan--lost in the forest, temples and gods and
everything. Men and women there, once upon a time, thinking they were
a fine people, the only great people, with a king and princesses and