around. The familiar and accustomed possession of the prime bounties of nature must be always gratifying to those whose senses and whose imagination are even in tolerable vigour; but to an Englishman, blest with a sound constitution, and over whom the vicissitudes of life had not, as is too often the case, cast a mantle of despondency, to deaden present pleasure and darken future prospects, and who had so recently emerged from a dreary atmosphere, the enjoyment of this, to him, new-born paradisaical climate, resembled more a feeling of sudden and happy enchantment, than an elemental and natural delight, with which Providence had blessed a particular portion of the globe. On the 22d, we made the Cape de Verd Islands, and took our course betwixt the islands of St. Anthony, St. Vincent, St. Lucia, and St. Nicholas, to the westward, Sal and Bonavista being to the eastward of us. The isle of Sal is frequented by the Americans for salt, which is collected upon it. On the 23d, we ranged along the north-east side of St. Yago, the largest of the Cape de Verd Islands, but it was so completely enveloped in opaque clouds, that we could see no object distinctly upon it. It is, I believe, more verdant than any of the others, possessing groves of cocoa-nut trees, and bananas. The volcanic wastes of the island of Mayo, lying to the eastward of St. Yago, were not obscured by a single cloud, and the industry of man did not appear in any part of it to have subdued the sterility of nature. It was completely bare of vegetation, except an impoverished brushwood. I could only discover two or three solitary cocoa-nut trees; notwithstanding, at the end of this island nearest to us, there was a small town, possessing some apparent neatness, but without a single tree or any shelter to refrigerate the scorching rays of the sun. I observed a flag projecting from a window, which probably was the house of the governador: there was not an inhabitant to be seen, they were, no doubt, indulging in a _sesta_. The officers of a British ship of war, who had just come to anchor off the town, were preparing to go on shore, and might perhaps rouse some of them from their lethargy. This was a ship of about 20 guns, and we imagined she belonged to the Sierra Leone or African station, in which those islands might be included. No fortifications were visible any where, and it may be inferred, that the mother country regards so little the importance of those islands, that no precautions were ever adopted for their defence. The fogs by which they are usually obscured are attributed by some to vapours arising from the salt lakes; but as the same general law may be supposed to govern such condensations of fog, common to them as well as to the Canaries and other islands of a high elevation, I should be more disposed to think that they originate in the profuse exhalations in those latitudes, and in the increased power of attraction attached to