As the secretary anticipated, the tracks of the reinforcement were plainly discernible over the sandy downs and by the margins of the pestilent fens, which gave an air of desolation to this part of the Mexican coast, not much relieved by an occasional clump of palms, nor by the spectacle, here and there disclosed, of the broad ocean blackening among the low islets; though the hazy and verdant ramparts which stretched between these burning deserts and the imagined paradises of the interior, ever presented a field of refreshment and interest to the eyes of the travellers. The novelty of their situation, felt more or less intensely by all, was exciting: and many a dream of barbaric monarchs reposing on thrones of gold and emeralds, and canopied by flowers and feathers,--of dusky armies deploying among green valleys and on the borders of fair lakes,--and perhaps of themselves doing the work of heroes among these mystic multitudes,--wandered through their over-troubled fancies. Such visions flitted over the brain of Amador, but mingled with others, with which the past had more to do than the present; for, despite the eager longing with which he looked forward to a meeting with his good knight and kinsman, and, notwithstanding his impatient ardour to gaze with his own eyes upon those scenes which were filling the minds of men with wonder, he looked back from a sand-hill to the distant ships, and sighed, as, in an instant of time, his soul was borne from them, over the broad surges to the pleasant hills of Spain. But with the view of the squadron vanished his memory and his melancholy: the narrow belt of sand-hills along the coast had been exchanged for the first zone of vegetation; the mimosa afforded its shade; the breeze and the paroquet chattered together on its top; and when he came, at last, to journey among the shadows of a forest rich in magnificent and unknown trees and plants, with here a lagoon fringed with stately ceibas (the cotton-wood trees of Mexico) and gigantic canes, and there a water-course murmuring among palms and other tropical trees, he gave himself up to a complacent rapture. He remarked with satisfaction the bright plumage of water-fowl,--the egret, the pelican, the heron, and sometimes the flamingo, sporting among the pools; gazed with wonder after the little _picaflor_, or humming-bird, darting, like a sunbeam, from flower to flower; with still greater admiration listened to the song of the calandra and the cardinal, and to the magical _centzontli_,--the hundred-tongued,--as it caught and repeated, as if with a thousand voices, the thousand roundelays of other songsters scattered among the boughs; and it was not until the notes of a trumpet, swelling suddenly in the distance, invaded his reveries, that he roused from the voluptuous intoxication of such a scene.