God's sake, to speak to the captain, and obtain permission for him to leave the ship in the first homeward-bound vessel we should meet. He said and he sobbed more than he spoke, though he tried to hide his emotion as much as possible— he had acted thoughtlessly in leaving a happy home, which, poor as it was, contained his wife and three lovely children. He said that he could not forget the moment when he bade farewell to his wife, and when his children hung crying round his neck, and begged him not to leave them. These thoughts would not let him rest, and he saw, he felt now, how wrong, how heartless, how cruel had been his conduct, in so relentlessly turning his face from home. But they might meet a vessel, which would take him home again; and if he had spent his small capital in paying his passage to California, though he was only a weaver, and must now work hard day and night to make up for lost time, he would work cheerfully in his own home, and for his own wife and children.

As the man found more and more words for the utterance of his grief, the tears-the soothing tears-chased each other down his pale and careworn cheeks. I tried everything in my power to give his thoughts another direction, and his heart some hope. I promised him, to be sure, to ask the captain for the permission he sought; but what good could it do him, and where would he find in

the open sea a vessel, homeward-bound, the captain of which would lay back to take a poor, homesick passenger on board with his baggage. He became calm, at last, and thanking me for the kind words I had spoken to him, as he said, went down into his berth, and I saw him no more that day.

About eight days afterwards, coming nearer and nearer to the line, Neptune paid us a visit, and got paid very well for his trouble, finding a great number of greenhorns on board.

The festivities created by this incident had hardly passed, when we saw a sail coming right up to us. It was the English packet' Agincourt,' Captain Nisbett, who sent a boat to us to get, if possible, some German newspapers for a party of German and Dutch passengers, whom the Agincourt' had taken in at Cape Town. We gave the young officer, who came on board, all we could spare, and half-an-hour afterwards the large and beautiful craft was only a speck on the horizon.

My poor home-sick friend, who had been looking eight days before with painful hope for such an accident, though no ship would have waited to take him on board, stood on the gangway in his old place as long as she was in sight, silent and sad, and without moving a limb, never turning his eye for a second from the strange vessel; and there he stood after the sun had sunk behind the

horizon, and spread darkness over the vast deep, with his eyes fixed on the point at which the ship had disappeared. He had spoken to me again the day before, but no longer wished to leave the vessel, having reconciled himself to going on to California.

After a succession of most disagreeable calms, each of which laid us up for about a week, we had a good and refreshing breeze from the south-east, the common trade-wind in these latitudes; and this breeze brought us some fine sport with porpoises. Though we speared several, however, we could never get them on deck. The fact was, that when the fish first showed themselves, there was, ten to one, no harpoon to be found, or the line was tangled or missing; or, should this accidentally have been in order and I for one did. my best to keep it so the ten or twelve stout fellows planted at the line, to pull altogether at the word, would get tired at the critical moment, and all our care would be thrown away.

In the latitude of Cape Frio, and not far from the Brazilian coast, we got a touch of the tropics in a tolerably strong pampero. The proper place for these winds is the mouth of La Plata, but sometimes they reach up as high as this, and even higher, not unfrequently doing great damage among the shipping. A few days afterwards, indeed, we saw a Brazilian man-of-war, which had

got dismasted in this very pampero, just before the entrance of the Bay of Rio de Janeiro.

For several days we lay under close-reefed topsails, and, at the same time, had the pleasure to know that we were driving considerably out of our course. A great many of the passengers became sea-sick again, but the storm did not last long, and on the 10th of May, we were once more able to set sail. On the 11th, we made Cape Frio, and from thence kept the picturesque coast of the Brazils in sight all day, reaching on the morrow the entrance of the Sugar-loaf Mountain.

Early in the afternoon, we beheld that beautiful panorama, which surrounds one of the most splendid harbours of the world, and the closer we neared the land, the more distinctly did the mountains and hills gain life and colour. Long and seemingly straight ranges grew up in single groups, showing separate peaks and ridges. We could mark the outlines of vegetation, and even of trees and shrubs; and there, on those beautiful little island twins-Naya and Maya, as the Portuguese call them-rose the first cocoa-palms, with their slender stems and graceful leaves, nodding a welcome to the foreign visitors.

CHAPTER II.

RIO DE JANEIRO.

IN the tropics, night follows immediately on the setting of the sun; and entering soon after sundown the Sugar-loaf Gate, as the entrance to the harbour is called from the conical and most singular-shaped hill on the southern head, we could just see the lights shine out from the opposite coast, where the city lies, and the dark outlines of the nearest ships, the whole surrounded by high and towering masses of mountain ridges.

Inside the entrance we were hailed from the northern shore--from the Fort Santa Cruz-but the voice sounded as if it came from the deep, and the words being, of course, Portuguese, we could not understand a word of it. But our supercargo spoke the language, having some time ago lived many years in the Brazils; and he and the gentleman in the fort conversed a little while in such unintelligible roars, as are heard occasionally