We had already passed the citadel and bell-buoy, and, having discharged our pilot, were watching the fast receding shores, when we met the English mail-steamer from Point de Galle, in the island of Ceylon. We saluted each other, and then learned--what was given to us as reliable news--that war had been declared between America and some other power, but the name of the nation with which our Government had come in collision, our officers, from some defect in the signal, could not interpret. This created, at first, some painful doubts and misgivings; but the belief finally gained ground that so long as the Southern Rebellion remained unquelled the United States would not embroil herself in a foreign war, unless it was forced upon her by the most imperious necessity. The weather continued quiet and the sea was still undisturbed, although for three or four days after leaving Port Louis there were times when dark, lurid, and portentous clouds hung heavily upon the horizon and floated over us, and one evening there was also a dead calm, when everything excepting the glass indicated a coming tempest; but we steamed out of its neighborhood before it burst upon us, and all breathed more freely when getting ten or twelve degrees north of Mauritius, for we were then tolerably certain of a safe and quiet voyage. Some months afterwards we learned that we had not miscalculated in regard to the coming of the _cyclones_, or wind-storms, but that, in a few days after we had sailed through that region, it was visited by one of these terrible hurricanes. We weighed anchor at the harbor of Port Louis on the afternoon of the 27th of December, and on the morning of the 30th, at eleven o’clock, our wheels had completed one million of revolutions since leaving New York. On the 2d of January we passed the Chagos Archipelago, the largest island of which group (Diego Garcia) belongs to England. It is fourteen miles long and eight in width, and is of coral formation, having a fine harbor, in the form of a crescent, setting into the island like the cavity of a shell. Good water is found by digging eight feet. It is covered with cocoanut-trees, and the Mauritians inhabit it mainly to engage in the cocoanut-oil manufacture.