ered as a matter of much
consequence.

At the city-gate stands a sentry--the strangest thing I ever saw in the
guise of a soldier--a brown Indian of the coast, dressed in some rags
that were a uniform once, shoeless, filthy in the extreme, and armed
with an amazing old flint-lock. He is bad enough to look at, in all
conscience, and really worse than he looks, for--no doubt--he has been
pressed into the service against his will, and hates white men and
their ways with all his heart. Of course he will run away when he gets
a chance; and, though he will be no great loss to the service, he will
add his mite to the feeling of hatred that has been growing up for
these so many years among the brown Indians against the whites and the
half-cast Mexicans. But more of this hereafter.

One step outside the gate, and we are among the sand-hills that stretch
for miles and miles round Vera Cruz. They are mere shifting
sand-mounds; and, though some of them are fifty feet high, the fierce
north wind moves them about bodily. The Texans know these winds well,
and call them "northers." They come from Hudson's Bay to the Gulf of
Mexico, right down the Continent of North America, over a level plain
with hardly a hill to obstruct their course, the Rocky Mountains and
the Alleghanies forming a sort of trough for them. When the "norte"
blows fiercely you can hardly keep your feet in the streets of Vera
Cruz, and vessels drag their anchors or break from their moorings in
the ill-protected harbour, and are blown out to sea--lucky if they
escape the ugly coral-reefs and sand-banks that fringe the coast. There
are a few bushes growing outside the walls, and there we found the
Nopal bush, the great prickly pear--the same that has established
itself all round the shores of the Mediterranean--growing in crevices
of rocks, and cracks in lava-beds, and barren places where nothing else
will live. But what made us notice these Nopals was, that they were
covered with what looked like little white cocoons, out of which, when
they were pressed, came a drop of deep crimson fluid. This is the
cochineal insect, but only the wild variety; the fine kind, which is
used for dye, and conies from the province of Oajaca, miles off, is
covered only with a mealy powder. There the Indians cultivate great
plantations of Nopals, and spread the insects over them with immense
care, even removing them, and carrying them up into the mountains in
baskets when the rainy season