While admiring the rarely equalled beauty of the scenery there came very suddenly upon us a slight tropical shower, which passing away rapidly, as the sun reappeared, the arch of a beautiful rainbow sprang from behind the mountains, giving to the varied landscape an air of surpassing beauty and enchantment. This scene, however magnificent, was but the prelude to another equally grand and beautiful. A tropical sunset is always a splendid spectacle, but a tropical sunset after a storm is an event in one’s lifetime,--one of those few phases of Nature, in fact, which cannot be described any more than the impressions which they create. A scene like this it fell to our lot to witness on that memorable evening, as the shower moved off,--its dark skirts tinged with brilliant sapphire by the setting sun. Then there were the white and fleecy clouds that lagged in the wake of the storm, exquisitely tinted with the pale red of the opal and the delicate violet of the amethyst,--so beautiful as almost to vie with the hues of the rainbow, whose broken arch gleamed just over the distant mountains. We fired our guns, and rounding a lofty peak, (which, with a signal-station upon its top, loomed up at our right,) entered the harbor of Port Louis. We did not wait to take on board a pilot, for although it was our Captain’s first visit to this island he was too accomplished a navigator to require any such aid. With the vessel at half speed, we felt our way up the channel by continued soundings, until we reached the quarantine ground, our quarter-deck filled with a happy group, whose hearts seemed overrunning with delight at the beauty of the scenes around them, to say nothing of our anticipated pleasure in “doing” the town and environs of Port Louis. The warning advice of an English ship-captain whose vessel we passed while coming up the harbor,--“not to attempt going to the wharf,”--fell like a discordant note upon our ears; and on reaching the anchorage a burly English pilot came alongside, but would not touch his foot to the gangway-stairs until well assured that there was no sickness on board, and that no death had occurred since our leaving the Cape. He was a bustling, loquacious man, and when ascending to the quarter-deck said, in a very brusque and loud tone of voice, “Well, we have the cholera thick in this port!”--the effect of which announcement was electrical, and, mute with sudden fear and disappointment, one by one, we withdrew to the cabin below.