II.—Four Idols 216 Plate No. III.—Four Idols 216 Plate No. IV.—Fragments of Idols or Ornaments 216 Plate No. V.—Vessels 216 Plate No. VI.—Turtle and Household Utensils 216 Vignettes, &c., &c. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [Illustration: Map of Yucatan Mexico] ------------------------------------------------------------------------ RAMBLES IN YUCATAN. CHAPTER I. Setting Out—Accommodations—Arrival at Sisal—Geographical and Political view of Yucatan—A Christening—Lady Smokers—Off for the Interior—Merida—A Feast-day—Christmas Eve—Christmas Day—Conclusion of a Feast—Holy Unction—Indian Character—Soldiers’ Return—Holy Days—Gaming. The prospect of leaving one’s country for a season, affects different people in very different ways. To some, it suggests only the loss of friends, and the want of the conveniences which habit may have made to them the necessaries of life. By their formidable equipments, their groaning trunks, and systematic leave-takings, they intimate a foregone conclusion, that every nation except their own is peopled with Ishmaelites, whose hands are ever raised against the rest of mankind. There is another class, who have faith in man wherever he exists, and who rely upon the permanence of the laws of Nature; who do not imagine that a man is necessarily a cannibal or a troglodyte because born in a different degree of latitude, nor that water will refuse to run down hill at a foreigner’s request. Through their confidence in the uniformity of Nature’s laws, they feel it unnecessary to equip themselves for a campaign into chaos when they leave their native land, always presuming every corner of this planet, however remote from the illuminating centres of civilization, to be possessed of some of the elements of existence, such as air, fire, water, &c., which a traveller may spare himself the trouble of bringing from home in his trunk. With the latter class, kind reader, the author of the following notes deserves to be associated. He would require nothing but a valise to contain his outfit for a circumnavigation of the globe, and would include the moon in his circuit, if practicable, without materially enlarging his equipage, except, perhaps, by some device that would diminish the inconveniences of a rarefied atmosphere. This faith in the future, this trust in the resources which a mind of ordinary intelligence can always command under any sun and in any clime, sustained the writer in his determination, last fall, to visit some of the islands of the West India seas, almost without notice, and with scarcely more preparation than a domestic man would deem essential for an absence from home of a single week. The cork-legged merchant of Rotterdam did not commence his journeyings more unexpectedly to himself,