298 The Naturalist in Nicaragua 
than was agreeable to my insular prejudices. When in the 
middle of the night an old woman tried to roll me off the soft 
plank I had found for myself into a litter of crying babies, I 
indulged in some bitter reflections on the race, that, I am 
happy to say, were as transitory as the inconvenience to 
which I was put. At San Carlos we changed to the river 
steamer under my old friend Captain Birdsall. As I have 
already described the scenery of the San Juan in the account 
of my journey up, I shall not repeat the story, but simply 
state that we reached Greytown on the 11th September, and 
on the 16th embarked on the West Indian Mail Packet. I 
arrived in England within a month, to find my native town 
(Newcastle) wealthier and dirtier than ever, with thousands 
of furnaces belching out smoke and poisonous gases; to find 
the people of England fretting about the probable exhaustion 
of her coal-fields in a few hundred years, actually dreading the 
time when she will no longer be the smithy of the world, but 
the centre of the science, philosophy, literature, and art of 
the Anglo-Saxon race—that race whose sons all over the 
globe will then look up to her with loving reverence as the 
mother of nations, the coloniser of the world, the pioneer of 
freedom, progress, and morality. 
