* * * * * California is too British to be typically American: it would seem that nowhere in the United States have we found the true America or the real American. Except as abstractions, they do not exist; it is only by looking carefully at each eccentric and irregular America--at Irish New York, at Puritan New England, at the rowdy South, at the rough and swaggering far West, at the cosmopolitan Pacific States--that we come to reject the anomalous features, and to find America in the points they possess in common. It is when the country is left that there rises in the mind an image that soars above all local prejudice--that of the America of the law-abiding, mighty people who are imposing English institutions on the world. CHAPTER XXV. MEXICO. In company with a throng of men of all races, all tongues, and all trades, such as a Californian steamer can alone collect, I came coasting southward under the cliffs of Lower California. Of the thousand passengers who sought refuge from the stifling heat upon the upper and hurricane decks, more than half were diggers returning with a “pile” to their homes in the Atlantic States. While we hung over the bulwarks watching the bonitos and the whales, the diggers threw “bolas” at the boobies that flew out to us from the blazing rocks, and brought them down screaming upon the decks. Threading our way through the reefs off the lovely Island of Margarita, where the “Independence” was lost with three hundred human beings, we lay-to at Cape St. Lucas, and landed his Excellency Don Antonio Pedrin, Mexican Governor of Lower California, and a Juarez man, in the very bay where Cavendish lay in wait for months for the “great Manilla ship”--the Acapulco galleon. When Girolamo Benzoni visited the Mexican Pacific coast, he confused the turtle with the “crocodile,” describing the former under the latter‘s name; but at Manzanilla, the two may be seen lying almost side by side upon the sands. Separated from the blue waters of the harbor by a narrow strand there is a festering lagoon, the banks of which swarm with the smaller alligators; but a few yards off, upon the other slope, the townsfolk and the turtles they had brought down for sale to our ship‘s purser were lying, when I saw them, in a confused heap under an awning of sailcloth nailed up to the palm-trees. Alligator, turtle, Mexican, it was hard to say which was the superior being. A French corvette was in possession of the port--one of the last of the holding-places through which the remnants of the army of occupation were dribbling back to France.