It certainly takes the impatience out of one to travel very much on a sail vessel. The dead certainty of your getting becalmed annihilates even contrary anticipation. But instead of murmuring at the irksome roll of this spell-bound ship, which flaps its sails as vainly as a bird with cropped wings, I, with genuine Spartan philosophy, will make the most of it by going visiting, that is, from the cabin to the forecastle. Here I take a seat beside an American; (for, my dear H., nobody ever knows what true friendship is until they have been shipwrecked, nor does any one conceive how mutual are the sympathies of persons coming from the same country, however remote their positions may have been, until they have met away from home, and been surrounded by foreign influences. Strange as it may seem, I have not met a colored American out this way but who actually celebrates the Fourth of July.) Instead of complaining of this ghastly calm, as I was about to say, I take a seat beside my friend Mr. Johnson, formerly of Plymouth, Massachusetts, from whom I learned the following important story, albeit, a love story. Important because it shows the correctness of that theory which assumes this,--the infusion of Northern blood as one of the means by which the more sluggish race of the tropics is to be quickened and given energy, and also how these seductive southern zones induce persons to sacrifice kindred, friends, and home, in order to live and die under their soothing influences. The story is this: Some years ago he had sailed from Boston to Balize with a cargo of ice; was taken sick, and the captain of his vessel, having made all possible arrangements for his comfort, left him in the hospital to recover. He did so, and was just on the eve of going over to Jamaica to get on board a vessel in which to return home, when up stepped an elderly man, who accosted him in English and also in Yankee, to wit: “Guess you are from the States?” to which Mr. Johnson replied, of course, “You, too, I suppose?” The fact is, if you could not tell an American away from home by his looks, his salutatory phrases are as certain as an oddfellow’s password.