Against our will, too, these pernicious insects board our train and refuse to be blown out again by all the draughts which we tax our ingenuity to create. So we sit up sulkily in a cloud of tobacco smoke far into the night and Arizona--watching the wonderful cactus-plants passing our windows in gaunt procession, and here and there seeing a fire flash past us, lit probably by Papajo Indians for the preparation of their abominable "poolke" liquor. But the mosquitoes are satisfied at last, and go to sleep, and so we go too. We awake in the Santa Cruz Valley, with the preposterous cactus poles and posts standing up as stiff and straight as sentries "at attention," and looking as if they were doing it for a joke. There is no unvegetable form that they will not take, for they mimic the shape of gate posts, semaphores, bee-hives, and even mops--anything, in fact, apparently that falls in with their humour, and makes them look as unlike plants as possible. I am not sure that they ought not to be punished, some of them. Such botanical lawlessness is deplorable. But, after all, is not this America, where every cactus "may do as he darned pleases"? These cacti, by the way--the gigantic columnar species, which throws up one solid shaft of flesh, fluted on each side, and studded closely with rosettes of spines--are the same that crowd in multitudinous impis on the side of the hills which slope from the massacre-field of Isandula in Zululand, down to the Buffalo River. How well I remember them! If it were not for the cactus it would be a miserably uninteresting country, for the vegetation is only the lowest and poorest looking scrub, and water as yet there is none. But now we are approaching what the inhabitants call "the ancient and honourable pueblo of Tucson," pronouncing it Too son, and ancient and honourable we found it--For does it not dispute with Santa Fe the title of the most ancient town in the United States? and was not the breakfast which it gave us worthy of all honour?