Jalapa is a pleasant city among the hills, in a country of forests, green turf, and running streams.  It is the very paradise of botanists; and its products include a wonderful variety of trees and flowers, from the apple- and pear-trees of England to the mameis and zapotes of tropical America, and the brilliant orchids which are the ornament of our hot-houses.  The name of the town itself has a botanical celebrity, for in the neighbouring forests grows the Purga de Jalapa, which we have shortened into jalap.

A day’s journey above it, lies the limit of eternal snow, upon the peak of Orizaba; a day’s journey below it is Vera Cruz, the city of the yellow fever, surrounded by burning sands and poisonous exhalations, in a district where, during the hot months now commencing, the thermometer scarcely ever descends below 80 deg., day or night.  Jalapa hardly knows summer or winter, heat or cold.  The upper current of hot air from the Gulf of Mexico, highly charged with aqueous vapour, strikes the mountains about this level, and forms the belt of clouds that we have already crossed more than once during our journey.  Jalapa is in this cloudy zone, and the sky is seldom clear there.  It is hardly hotter in summer than in England, and not even hot enough for the mosquitoes, which are not to be found here though they swarm in the plain below.  This warm damp climate changes but little in the course of the year.  There are no seasons, in our sense of the word, for spring lasts through the year.

We walked out on the first afternoon of our arrival; and sat on stone seats on a piece of green turf surrounded by trees, that reminded us pleasantly of the village-greens of England.  There we talked with the children of an English acquaintance who had been settled for many years in the town, and had married a Mexican lady.  They were fine lads; but, as very often happens in such cases, they could only speak the language of the country.  Nothing can show more clearly how thoroughly a foreigner yields to the influences around him, when he settles in a country and marries among its people.  An Englishman’s own character, for instance, may remain to some extent; but his children are scarcely English in language or in feeling, and in the next generation there is nothing foreign about his descendants but the name.

When we reached our hotel it was about sunset, and the heavy dew had wetted us through, as though we had been walking in the rain.  This was no exceptional occurrence.  All the year round such dews fall morning and evening, as well as almost daily showers of rain.  The climate is too warm for this dampness to injure health, as it would in our colder regions.  To us, who had just left the bracing air of the high plateaus, it seemed close and relaxing; but the inhabitants are certainly strong and healthy, and one can imagine the enjoyment which the white inhabitants of Vera Cruz must feel, when they can get away from that city of pestilence into the pure air of the mountains.