Disjoint-set Data Structure in Python

I needed this code to write Kruskal's minimum spanning tree algorithm.

class DisjointDataStruct(object): 
  """Disjoint-set data structure. 

  For details see:
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disjoint-set_data_structure

  Public functions:
  union(x, y)
  find(x)
  """

  def __init__(self, vertices):
    """My personal representation of the spaghetti stack.

    vertices - a list of vertex names from a graph
    """
    self.struct = {v: [v, 0] for v in vertices}

  def union(self, x, y):
    """Joins subsets x and y into a single subset.

    Uses union by rank optimization.

    x, y - vertex names corresponding to keys in self.struct
    """
    xRoot = self.find(x)
    yRoot = self.find(y)
    if xRoot == yRoot:
      return

    xV = self.struct[xRoot]
    yV = self.struct[yRoot]
    if xV[1] < yV[1]:
      xV[0] = yRoot
    elif xV[1] > yV[1]:
      yV[0] = xRoot
    else:
      yV[0] = xRoot
      xV[1] += 1

  def find(self, x):
    """Determines which subset a particular element x is in.

    Uses path compression optimization.

    x - vertex name corresponding to key in self.struct
    """
    if self.struct[x][0] != x:
      self.struct[x][0] = self.find(self.struct[x][0])
    return self.struct[x][0]

The timings are as follows:
__init__ is 17.5ms per loop in 100 loops with 100000 vertices (using timeit)
union has a mean of 1.0ms, standard deviation of 1.10e-7, min of ~0.9ms, and max of 1.0ms.
The union data was computed over the 224 union time values that did not equal 0 over a total of 100000 random unions of 100000 vertices (using time.time end - start).

On a single run of cProfile with a vertex set of 100000, and 100000 random unions where the two elements are not equal (I increment one of them if they are), I get the following values:
0.042s for __init__
0.197s for union in total (100000 calls) so per call is ~1.97e-06s
0.130s for find in total (299990 total / 200000 primitive) so per call is ~4.33e-07s

All of this was clocked running an i5-2500K @ 3.3GHz