As I intended to make no stay at Mobile, I did not use any of the letters of introduction I had with me, thinking I should in a short time see more of the men and manners of the place, if I accompanied a travelling acquaintance I had made, in his calls upon the firms with whom he had to transact business. I was four times during the morning invited, not to liquor, that expression I never once heard in America, but to take a drink. There is much heartiness of feeling here, and everybody carries out, to the full extent, the American practice of shaking hands with everybody, which is a rational way of expressing goodwill without saying anything. I walked about a mile out into the environs to see the houses of the merchants and well-to-do inhabitants. I passed three hospitals, one for yellow-fever cases that can pay, one for yellow-fever cases that cannot pay, and one for general cases. The streets of the town were full of pedestrians and of traffic. In this respect it bore a very favourable comparison with Charleston, where nothing was going on. The population amounts to about 34,000. The Spaniards who originally settled the place have been utterly obliterated. On inquiry I found that none had remained in the city, being quite unable in any department of business to support the competition of the Anglo-Saxon, but that among the mean whites, at some little distance from Mobile, a few Spanish names were to be found. These remnants of the original settlers the Alabamans call Dagos, a corruption of the common Spanish name of Diego. [Sidenote: _A Day on the Gulf of Mexico._] The great cotton ships cannot come to up to Mobile. There is, however, a magnificent bay, in the form of a great lake with a narrow inlet from the sea, in which they ride at anchor, waiting for their cargoes, at a distance of between thirty and forty miles from the city. I counted thirty-seven of these ships. They were almost all English. Some said there was not a single American among them. A few years ago far the greater part of them would have been American; but since they have taxed heavily everything received into the country, or manufactured in it, they have ceased to be able to build or to sail ships as cheaply as we can. I shall never forget the day I passed on the Gulf of Mexico in going from Mobile to New Orleans. The air was fresh and had just the slightest movement in it. The sky was unclouded, and the sun delightfully warm. We have pleasant enough days at home occasionally, but this belonged to quite another order of things. And as the darkness came on, the night was as fine and bright, after its kind, as the day had been. Many sat talking on the deck till long after the sun was down. Some, I suppose, felt that this would be their only day on the Gulf of Mexico.