Nothing but troubled sleep came to our relief
during these days. Fear of the Spaniards and the movements of the
lizards on the rafters and walls, with now and then a tarantula, made
rest almost impossible. At last we had only one day more, the tenth
day. We had gotten familiar with the different scenes, the waving
palms, the trailing vines where the monkeys climbed or hung by their
tails and chattered in their own way. The scarlet lingawacha, or
tongue plant, hung in graceful lengths and brightened the varied
colored green in the background. Innumerable families of parrots
talked and screamed from the branches. Bananas and orange trees
everywhere interspersed with tall cocoanut palms, the large and small
alligators basking in the sun on the sand were pictures never to be
forgotten. The natives in their peculiar dress, the fandango at night,
the graceful twirl of the Spanish waltz put the life touch to the
picture that comes to me today at the age of seventy-five as it was in
those days when I experienced, a girl of fifteen, all the discomforts
of travel from Cincinnati to California.
It was about 4 o'clock on the tenth day when we arrived at the small
village where we were to remain for the night and next morning, then
ho! for Panama. We had better accommodations here, a large adobe
house, kept by a Spaniard and wife and daughters, under the
supervision of the steamship company, which also controlled the scows
that we used on the river Chagres.
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