Near the Cape of Good Hope, Cape Horn, and the Falkland Isles you encounter many birds, albatross, cape pigeons, mulehogs, and all varieties of gulls. They feed on the waste thrown overboard and escort the ship halfway to Australia. You greet them as old friends whom you met a year ago and are glad to see back again. The gull and albatross are regarded as sacred, for it is the belief of the seaman that some day he will return to earth as a gull or albatross. Each one of these birds is the soul of a seaman. The white gulls are good souls. The brown or black gulls are bad souls, the "sea devils." When you are running before the trade wind south of the equator, the appearance of the albatross is a great event in the monotony of the voyage. Majestically the great white bird sweeps up and down, now before the bow now behind the stern, and circles the ship. He is the ruler of the Southern seas. It is a common belief among seamen that nobody ever succeeded in bringing an albatross alive to the Northern Hemisphere. Sometimes off the coast of Africa hundreds of swallows that have lost their way in a fog alight on a ship's rigging, exhausted. Sometimes dozens of storks do. They never rise again. There is no suitable food on board for them. It is pitiful to see them waste away and drop dead on deck or into the sea. There is no help for it. They die a seaman's death, like sailors adrift without food or water. Our ship lay idle in Tampico. A comrade and I got shore leave. We were allured by the romantic life of the lasso-throwing vaqueros, with their herds of long-horned cattle, their fiery broncos, their silver-mounted saddles. A German settler put two horses at our disposal, and, to shame the idea that sailors cannot ride, we went galloping around the country on a tour that lasted several days. When we returned to Tampico, our ship had sailed. In a country so rich as Mexico, it was not hard to make a living. All you had to do was to stand around the market-place and lend a hand. You earned enough to live and had a few coins left to squander in the gambling houses. For a couple of weeks, we made our living by carrying market baskets. We joined the Mexican Army. Anybody could become a soldier. Life was pleasant and lazy, although the quarters were poor. We were sent to Mexico City, and there for several days stood on guard at the palace of the great Porfirio Diaz, under whose dictatorship Mexico was then enjoying her golden days. We quit the army and worked on a railroad construction in the interior. In a gang of Italians, Poles, Germans, and Jamaica Negroes we transported sand, soil, and materials for railroad trestles. Then we worked for a German who had a ranch on which he raised poultry and fruit.