58 TEAVEL, ADVENTURE, AND SPOET. 



making arrangements for passing the night. Con- 

 found the fellows ! If they had seen us preparing 

 to lie down in a swamp, cheek by jowl with an alli- 

 gator, I believe they would not have offered a word 

 of remonstrance. Those Mexican half-breeds, half 

 Indian half Spaniard, with sometimes a dash of the 

 ^N"egro, are themselves so little pervious to the dan- 

 gers and evils of their soil and climate, that they 

 never seem to remember that Yankee flesh and blood 

 may be rather more susceptible ; that niguas l and 

 mosquitoes, and vomito prieto, as they call their 

 infernal fever, are no trifles to encounter ; without 

 mentioning the snakes and scorpions, and alliga- 

 tors, and other creatures of the kind, which infest 

 their strange, wild, unnatural, and yet beautiful 

 country. 



I had come to Mexico in company with Jonathan 

 Rowley, a youth of Virginian raising, six-and-twenty 

 years of age, six feet two in his stockings, with the 

 limbs of a Hercules and shoulders like the side of a 

 house. It was towards the close of 1824; and the 

 recent emancipation of Mexico from the Spanish 

 yoke, and its self-formation into a republic, had given 

 it a new and strong interest to us Americans. We 



1 The nigua is a small but very dangerous insect which 

 fixes itself in the feet, bores holes in the skin, and lays its eggs 

 there. These, if not extracted (which extraction, by the by, is 

 a most painful operation), cause first an intolerable itching, 

 and subsequently sores and ulcers of a sufficiently serious 

 nature to entail the loss of the feet. 



