410 
SCENES IN THE PACIFIC. 
over to neighbor Parker’s to invite them to a husking, and 
the old gentleman insisted, after I had done my errand, that 
I should stay awhile and help John shell a grist of yellow 
coi n ; for he wanted to go to mill at sunrise next morning. 
So down I sat on a little wooden bench at one end of the 
warming-pan handle, which was put through the ears of a 
wash-tub, and shelled away bravely. But all the time I was 
at work, Rachel was pulling my ears, and throwing kernels 
of corn at me, and showing her white teeth and sweet lips 
and eyes around me, until my ears and cheeks burnt, my eyes 
w r ere swimming with love, and my head and heart felt so 
mixed up together that they have never got unravelled since.” 
Another one said that these yarns about love were always 
coming up around the windlass, and he hoped they would be 
hauled in, and stowed away soon, for it was quite enough to 
remember one’s girl and poor old mother thousands of miles 
away when obliged to; and that this way of bringing them 
into every watch, and harrowing up one’s feelings, was worse 
than being strung up at the yardarm every twelve hours: as 
he said this, he turned away, and wiped his moist cheek on the 
sleeve of his pea-jacket. 
On the 11th, we lay along the Cape. The contour of 
the land was distinctly visible. The mountains rise in arid 
% 
grandeur, rough volcanic cinders, red and desolate. They 
are curiously piled. Huge mountains sprout from the main 
masses, and hang over wooded jungles a thousand feet below. 
Turrets rise on turrets like giant castles of an olden land 
They are an irregular, unstratified, ugly, desolate confusion 
of rocks and dust. On the 12th, we lay six miles SE. of the 
point of the Cape. We had a fine view of both shores of 
the Gulf of California for fifty miles. The scenery was ex¬ 
tremely interesting. The eastern Cape shore was much like 
the western. The eastern shore of the Gulf, the edge of the. 
Mexican main, was sublime. Not so much so on account of 
its massiveness or its altitude, as its resemblance to a conti- 
