After two busy days at Oxford, devoted to packing up and to taking hasty farewells of kind old friends (both things I detest), I went down to Hampshire to spend the Sunday previous to sailing with my brother at Kneller Court. The omens were inauspicious, for it blew hard all day, with torrents of rain. Next morning, however, was calm and bright as we motored to Southampton, where I boarded {155} R.M.S.P. _Aragon_, nearly 5,000 tons bigger than the good old _Magdalena_. We sailed at noon, crossed to Cherbourg in perfect weather, and found the Bay of Biscay next day all smiles and dimples and sunshine. I did not land at Lisbon, having seen it all before, and having no friends there. We dropped quietly down the Tagus at sundown, just when points of light were breaking out over the city, and all the church bells seemed to be ringing the Angelus. We had a full ship, and our voyage was diversified by the usual sports, of which I was an "honorary president," my colleagues in that sinecure office being a Brazilian coffee-king, the President-elect of Argentina, and a Belgian Baron. There were four Scotsmen at my table in the saloon, three of them Davids! Somewhere about the Equator we kept the birthday of King Edward, whose health was pledged by Brazilians and Argentinos as cordially and enthusiastically as by the British. I wrote to Fritz Ponsonby to tell him of this, for His Majesty's information.[2] Two days later we sighted the low green shores of Brazil. I looked with interest at the well-remembered heights of Olinda, with the white walls of S. Bento shining {156} in the morning sun. Somehow I did not picture myself stationed there again, though a newspaper which came aboard at Pernambuco announced, I noticed, that "o conhecido educationalista sr. David Hurter-blais" was coming to that city "afim de tratar da educação religiosa das classes populares!" The passengers for Pernambuco, I observed, were now chucked into the Company's lighter in a basket (in West African style), instead of having to "shin" down a dangerous companion in a heavy swell, as we used to do. Two lank-haired red-brown Indians, who came on board here to sell feather fans and such things, interested me; and I recalled how Emerson had described the aboriginals of North America as the "provisional races"--"the red-crayon sketch of humanity laid on the canvas before the colours for the real manhood were ready."