"I shall want a letter of credit," I said, "and I shall be obliged if you will attend to the matter for me. I suppose it is necessary to deposit the amount with the firm on which the letter is drawn." "That is the customary way," he answered, "but I can arrange it a little better to your advantage, by guaranteeing payment through my banker. That will save interest on the money. What size shall the letter be?" My Uncle had no idea of being responsible for a penny beyond the amount in his hands, out of my annual allowance. Ah, well, that would be more than enough, probably. At the worst, my income was accumulating, and at the end of a few months I could send to him for another letter, if I remained away so long. So I told him to get a credit for $2000 and send it to my lodgings at his convenience. Then having asked after the health of my two maiden aunts, with whom he lived--as if I cared whether they were sick or well; they never had bothered about me when I was at the worst of my long illness!--I took my departure. That evening I studied the advertisements of the steamship lines, both in the Herald and in the Commercial Advertiser. There were excursions going to the Mediterranean, which presented most attractive prospectuses, but they did not convince me that they were what I wanted. I never liked travelling by route, preferring to leave everything open for any change of mind. There were the usual lines to England, France and Germany, but I had seen those countries several years earlier, just before entering college, and according to my recollection they were anything but restful. The particular temptations I was to avoid were rather too plenty on the other side of the Atlantic to trust myself there. I was more inclined toward some of the South American countries, till I happened to read in a despatch that yellow fever had broken out there, and I knew that those quarantines were something to be avoided at all hazards. Thinking of quarantines suddenly brought back the memory of a trip I had taken three years earlier to the Windward and Leeward Islands, where I had been detained in the most comfortable quarantine station in the world--the one at St. Thomas. I smiled to recall the discouraged feeling with which I and my travelling acquaintances heard, at the little town of Ponce, in Porto Rico, that we would have to be detained under guard fifteen days when we reached St. Thomas; how we had the blues for twenty hours; how the indigo darkened, when we were taken from our steamer and landed from a row boat, bag and baggage, at the foot of a long path that led up to the Station.