CHAPTER II. "Amid all the wreck of empires, nothing ever spoke so forcibly the world's mutations, as this immense forest, shrouding what was once a great city."--STEPHENS. At daylight on the next morning after the singular adventure recorded in the preceding chapter, the California passengers bound eastward arrived, and those of us bound to the westward were transshipped to the same steamer which they had just abandoned. In less than an hour we were all aboard, and the little river-craft was busily puffing her way toward the fairy shores of Lake Nicaragua. For me, however, the evergreen scenery of the tropics possessed no charms, and its balmy air no enchantments. Sometimes, as the steamer approached the ivy-clad banks, laden as they were with flowers of every hue, and alive with ten thousand songsters of the richest and most variegated plumage, my attention would be momentarily aroused, and I enjoyed the sweet fragrance of the flowers, and the gay singing of the birds. But my memory was busy with the past, and my imagination with the future. With the Judge, even, I could not converse for any length of time, without falling into a reverie by no means flattering to his powers of conversation. About noon, however, I was fully aroused to the beauty and sublimity of the surrounding scenery. We had just passed Fort San Carlos, at the junction of the San Juan River with the lake, and before us was spread out like an ocean that magnificent sheet of water. It was dotted all over with green islands, and reminded me of the picture drawn by Addison of the Vision of Mirza. Here, said I to myself, is the home of the blest. These emerald islets, fed by vernal skies, never grow sere and yellow in the autumn; never bleak and desolate in the winter. Perpetual summer smiles above them, and wavelets dimpled by gentle breezes forever lave their shores. Rude storms never howl across these sleeping billows, and the azure heavens whisper eternal peace to the lacerated heart. Hardly had these words escaped my lips, when a loud report, like a whole park of artillery, suddenly shook the air. It seemed to proceed from the westward, and on turning our eyes in that direction, we beheld the true cause of the phenomenon. Ometepe was in active eruption. It had given no admonitory notice of the storm which had been gathering in its bosom, but like the wrath of those dangerous men we sometimes encounter in life, it had hidden its vengeance beneath flowery smiles, and covered over its terrors with deceitful calm.