When we got down to the docks strange equatorial-looking boxes were being unloaded, and there were unfamiliar odors proceeding from crates of fruits, with spiky green things poking out, and something aromatic and suggestive about them. Unfamiliar people more highly colored and less clear-cut than I am accustomed to were gesticulating and running about and talking in Spanish, with quantities of strange-looking luggage, countless children, and a great deal of very light-yellow shoe. It was twelve o'clock as we left. N. had our steamer chairs arranged, and we went down to lunch to the sound of the loudest gong that ever invited me to refresh. The _comedor_ (dining-room) had its menu printed in English and Spanish, and, of course, I lapped up the Spanish names with my lunch, which gave a charm and a relish to the otherwise uninteresting food. Table decorations in the shape of paper palms were rather disillusioning. The merest scrap of any growing exotic thing would have satisfied me, though N. said I was probably expecting to find the _comedor_ smothered in jasmine and mimosa, with orchids clinging to the walls. Well, perhaps I was. You know I am romantic. I am now ensconced on deck. Low, yellow stretches in the distances are the "Keys," and I am beginning to feel a slow firing of the imagination as we slip into these soft, bright waters--into the Caribbean. Our old Lamartine quotation comes to mind, "_Ainsi toujours poussés vers de nouveaux rivages_," etc. A Mérida family occupies the state-room nearest mine--five children, mother, father, and a beetling-browed Indian maid. I stumble over details of their luggage every time I go out of my cabin--a pea-green valise, a chair for one of the younger children, a large rocking-horse, a great, round, black-and-white cardboard box from some hat-shop in Fourteenth Street--they don't seem to mind what they carry. Their parrot I had removed early in the game; none of them ever went near it to give it food or water, though they had gone to the immense bother of traveling with it. It was evidently pleased to be going back to where it had come from, and its liveliest times were between 4 and 6 A.M. and 2 and 4 P.M. They have an awful little boy they shriek at, called Jenofonte (in toying with my dictionary I see it is Zenophon in English). He "hunts" with a quiet, bright-eyed little sister called Jesusita, whom I have several times found in my state-room investigating things. It seemed at first like having them all in with me. The state-rooms have only the thinnest partitions, with about a foot of nothing at the top for ventilation.