The little town or village of Port au Grande,--a miserably squalid nook of houses,--lies on the borders of a beautiful bay which is shut in on the south, east, and west by mountains, one of which, directly in the rear of the settlement, appears like an old fortress, and has a cloud continually resting upon its summit. The bay itself opens to the north, from which quarter one gets a cool sea-breeze; and in the distance, through a yellowish gray, dusty atmosphere are seen the mountains of St. Antonio. It is said that this peculiar atmosphere is produced by an impalpable sand blown by the wind from the African coast. There are but few white people in this colony, but the African race are quite numerous. We were coaled by these people, who are not slaves, but, in common with the whites, are always spoken of as Portuguese. There are slaves on some of these islands, but the Portuguese Government some two or three years ago passed a law manumitting them in fourteen years. They speak a _patois_ of Portuguese, English, and French, mingled with their African dialect. Little boats lying just under the stern of our vessel were filled with these people, all chatting glibly, and most curiously interlarding their conversation with an occasional word of English or French, which only made their unintelligible jargon seem the more rude and barbarous. The houses had a most miserable appearance, and were stuccoed in the Oriental style with a kind of dirty yellow or cream-colored chunam. The place boasts of one Romish church, the priests of which are Africans, who have been educated and prepared for the position which they occupy by Portuguese missionaries. Some of our passengers visited this church for the purpose of witnessing a marriage ceremony; but their account of it, together with the other services performed there, did not impress us very favorably either in regard to the priests or the people. The weather was very warm,--the mercury rising as high as 87° in the shade on reaching the islands. There is very little vegetation here; but we observed the palm growing before one or two houses in the town, and we also found some tropical fruits, but they were grown on the more fertile and productive islands. This island is mostly sterile, while St. Antonio has some fruitful valleys. There were two wells a little back of the shores of the bay,--one of them an Oriental-like fountain, which, with its shrubs and overhanging trees, was a very attractive object. The life-picture which this fountain presented at evening, when resorted to by the young women of the place,--who, filling their water-jars, and placing them on their heads stepped lightly homeward,--reminded us that we were fast journeying towards the East.