Thence we shipped by "Morgan Line" of steamers to Galveston, two hundred and fifty miles, on the Gulf of Mexico. Nothing occurred to mar the general pleasure of this part of the journey. Neptune was unusually quiet, only showing his disposition in gentle undulations of the deep; no heaving billows, with white caps breaking on their angry crests, and dashing the iron-bound vessel up in the air, and dropping her again in cradles of the deep; no qualms and retching to make one feel he didn't care whether the vessel lived or went to the bottom, but rather preferred the latter; and the sooner the better. No, a "norther'" was blowing off mainland--now and then in sight--and laid the waters smooth so that we took regular meals and kept them down, and were not thrown from our berths by a bouncing boat.
On approaching Galveston at sea, twenty miles away, vision is frequently cheated by the intervention of a mirage, the effect of which is to give to the city the appearance of air-suspension--a heavenward elongation, sitting on the lap of the ocean with no _terra firma_ beneath. But on nearer approach the illusion disappears, and there stands before you, on a small piece of nature's ground-work, and as though painted by a fairy hand, in spiritual shadows, on the low extended horizon beyond, Galveston, exciting the strange beholder into the romantic feeling that it is a city of fairies. And though the romance is toned down by the reality on landing, yet there she stands, one of the finest and most beautiful cities in the South of her size. She had before the war a population of twelve to fifteen thousand, and in one year after the war she had twenty-five thousand souls, and three thousand additional buildings.
Galveston stands on the east end of an island of the same name, running northeast and southwest, thirty miles in length, and with a varying width of two to four miles. Plausible tradition has it that when the island was first occupied and settled by Anglo-Americans, forty to fifty years ago, they found as its lone occupant a beautiful Castillian woman in male attire, supposed to have been connected with the notorious Captain Lafitte, who, with his band, committed piratical depredations on the Gulf and in the West Indies, and who had headquarters there and up the wilds of the Trinity River. Hence the island was first facetiously called "Gal-with-a-vest-on," but afterward it was reduced to the more elegant trisyllabic of Galveston.