However, we are still on board ship, and, after an easy and not too eventful voyage of some three months, are looking eagerly out for the first sight of the promised land. Bound to Auckland, New Zealand, our vessel is one of the largest that has yet sailed from Gravesend to that port; and she carries some three hundred emigrants and passengers on board. We have grown so accustomed to our good ship, and to our life on board of her, that we have got a strange feeling that this voyaging will never end; nor does the idea altogether arouse our discontent. We have had one or two births, and, alas! one poor child has been taken from our little company. There have, of course, been no weddings on board, but the prevailing opinion is that several have been arranged to take place as soon as we get on shore. And the time is very near now. At last, late one afternoon, as the ship is bowling steadily along with a ten-knot breeze on the port quarter, the deck is hailed from aloft, and the cheery, long-expected, and long-wished-for cry of "land ho!" is taken up by a hundred voices, and rings out across the sea. But there is nothing to be seen for all that; and though more than three hundred pairs of eyes keep anxious ward and watch, darkness falls before an almost imperceptible cloud upon the far horizon is pronounced oracularly by the mate to be Cape Maria Van Diemen, New Zealand's north-western-most promontory. One may easily imagine that it is difficult to "turn in" on a night when such a fresh excitement fills every mind, but, I suppose, most of us do contrive to get to sleep eventually. With the first break of dawn in the morning there is a stir and commotion all through the ship. Rules are forgotten, and etiquette broken through, as men, women, and children rush hastily on deck to take their first look at our future home. It is a beautiful summer morning. There is only a slight ripple on the surface of the water, and not a cloud in the blue sky overhead. The gentle breeze that just keeps us in motion blows off the land, bearing with it a subtle perfume of trees and flowers and herbage; how unspeakably grateful to our nostrils none can tell so well as we, who inhale it with ardour after so many weeks at sea.