There were only forty passengers on board, and, comparatively speaking,
little of the animation that usually precedes the outgoing of an ocean
steamer. I found without difficulty the French banker and his Mexican
wife who had kindly consented to chaperon me during my lonely journey;
and I soon discovered that she and I were the only women passengers on
board.

Our fellow-travelers were uninteresting--mostly commercial agents or
small tradesmen representing the old-established petty commerce with
Mexico. The new order of things was suggested, somewhat ominously, only
by the presence of two young surgeons on their way to increase the
effective force of the military hospital in Vera Cruz.

Evidently the predicted exodus to El Dorado had not yet begun. Where was
the advance-guard of the great army of emigrant capitalists now about to
start, and of which I had just heard so much?

This was the first serious disillusion of my life, and it left a deep
and permanent impression upon my mind. What was the relation between the
great banquet of Pereire & Co., this train full of statesmen, literati,
and other distinguished men, this blast of the press heralding a great
and joyful event in the commercial life of the French nation,--and this
old patched-up ship, with its scant load of commonplace and evidently
old Franco-Mexican tradesmen, lying in lonely dullness against the gray
sky on that gloomy evening?

Those men were rejoicing over us while we lay here at anchor. They were
drinking to phantoms evoked by their own imagination, and their glowing
speeches would to-morrow stir the fancy of thousands of readers who,