Explore "The Lotus and the Cockleburrs" by O. Henry on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
There are yet tales of the Spanish Main. That grim coast washed by the tempestuous Caribbean, and presenting to the sea a formidable border of tropical jungle topped by the overweening Cordilleras, is still begirt by mystery and romance.
Buccaneers and revolutionists have roused the echoes of its cliffs, and the condor has wheeled perpetually above where, in the dark green jungles, they made food for him with their pikes and cutlasses. Taken and retaken by pirates, by adverse powers, and by sudden uprising of rebellious factions, the old towns along the historic 300 miles of adventurous coast have scarcely known for hundreds of years whom rightly to call their master. Pizarro, Balboa, Sir Francis Drake, and Bolivar did what they could to make it a port of Christendom. Sir John Morgan, Lafitte, and other eminent sea-rovers, bombarded and pounded it in the name of Abaddon.