From six o’clock yesterday evening till noon to-day we had a breeze so light that at times the sky-sails flapped idly against the masts, and for several hours we were becalmed on a motionless sea,--a sea so wonderfully smooth that, but for the temperature, we might readily have fancied ourselves in the equatorial Doldrums again. At four yesterday afternoon a crisp little breeze came whipping along out of the south (although it lasted only two hours) driving away the squalls and muggy air, a bright, rosy atmosphere taking their place at sundown, with a horizon as sharply cut as the edge of a razor. As for the night which followed, it was as brittle and sparkling as any evening in Nova Scotia, wanting only the flashing pennons of the Aurora Borealis to complete the picture. The firmament glittered with splendid constellations, the stars dancing and scintillating with the glance of steel, as though electric sparks, while the Milky Way seemed firm and solid enough to walk upon. A magnificent sunrise succeeded this matchless night, and we stood entranced by the glory of the scene for half an hour, watching the lovely colors shift every few seconds like the revolutions of a kaleidoscope, changing the tiny, pink, shell-like clouds into glowing, golden embers as the great orb touched the horizon and threw a path of crimson fire even to the vessel’s side. Where are the gales of wind which are supposed to scream incessantly over the Southern Ocean? Where are the giant seas which sweep the South Atlantic with their foaming crests? It is not difficult to answer the latter question, for we will not meet with any of those tremendous rollers which have made Cape Horn the hobgoblin of navigators till we have cleared Staten Land and receive the full fury of the thousands of miles of tempestuous ocean which lie to the south and west of the Horn. It is true that on our first voyage we experienced very heavy weather when in this latitude; but then we were bound the other way and were near the forty-third eastern meridian (about four hundred miles the other side of Good Hope) at this parallel; the weather, as a general rule, is far worse farther to the eastward at 40° south than in here near the land, where bright skies and much smoother seas are the rule rather than the exception. We are not more than three hundred and fifty miles from South America now, so that even if we did have a heavy westerly gale (westerly winds are almost constant south of 30° south) the sea could not rise to such heights as it does off Agulhas and Cape Horn. But these gentle winds we cannot understand; at dinner-time to-day, though, a nice little breeze came along from the westward, and we are humming along under the sky-sails, doing well except that we are not making much westing, as we can’t do better than south by west.