What I saw on the west coast of South and North America, and at the Hawaiian Islands.: By H. Willis Baxley, M.D.

VOYAGE FROM NEW YORK TO ASPINWALL.
the English, its masculine, feminine, and neuter (I speak of its
tones), its sharp, its shrill, its mellow; its high, its low; its sonorous, its nasal; its oral, its guttural; its grave, its gay; its fast,
its slow; its tearful, its joyful; its sobbing, its cachinatory; and
so on ad lbitum-by the time these vocal modifications were
commingled with extravagances of emphasis, varied articulation,
and diverse pronunciation, with other "high falutin" et ceteras
of style, into which illiterate Americans, with a due admixture
of the extreme Yankee, and of the foreign cross, male and
female, are capable of twisting, distorting, contracting, expanding, and otherwise doing the English language; and the compound was blended with an approximative variety of German
and Irish, and a slight sprinkling of French, 8panish, and other
tongues, the possessors of which catching the spirit of transAtlantic transcendentalism of style seemed resolved not to be
outdone, and therefore clamored more vociferously, screamed
louder, and gesticulated more furiously, setting conventionalities
of social law, as well as the laws of sound, at defiance; I say, by
the time these vocal phenomena were commingled there was
produced, as chemists call it, a resultant (I will not say a mean
resultant for fear of being misapprehended) that out-babbled
Babel.
And as if this wordy war were not sufficiently discordant,
music, too, as it was libellously termed, was brought to aid in
the desecration of surrounding sublimity; and a villanous accordeon and execrable guitar, more villanously and execrably
thumbed, and attuned to human tones alike their own, made day
hideous, and drowned the solemn requiem the ocean was chanting around.
"Land, ho!" was cried this morning-five days from New
York. It was the island of Mariguana, one of the easternmost
of the Bahamas. We steered through the Pass of the same
name between it and Crooked Island. Large quantities of seaweed betokened our approach to land, cheering us as it did Columbus, whose dejected mariners it encouraged to hold on their way
until they at last reached San Salvador, one of the same group
somewhat to the west of our present southerly course; thus the
ocean drift was made to point the way to the Western World.
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