All last night it blew a fresh breeze and we gradually fell away to leeward, and at two o’clock this morning the captain decided to abandon Le Maire and kept off for Cape St. John. When we went on deck after breakfast (it was too dark to see anything before eight o’clock) we were startled at the sight. Broadside on, and parallel with our course, lay the extreme eastern end of Staten Land, distant not more than two miles, with the tiny, cosy harbor of St. John just abeam. So close to the land were we that we could easily see the stunted evergreens that covered the hills up to the snow-line, which is much higher here than towards the middle of the island, where the breakers seem to fling their spray upon the fields of snow; while high up on a rugged mountain side there stood an isolated, lonely pine-tree, bringing to mind those exquisite lines of Heine: “Ein Fichtenbaum steht einsam im Norden auf kahler Höh’, ihn schläfert, mit weisser Decke umhüllen ihn Eis und Schnee. Er träumpt von einer Palme, die fern im Morgenland einsam und schweigend trauert auf brennender Felsenwand.” Now that we had approached so closely we hoped to get some photographs of the hills, especially when the sun, bursting from a cloud on the horizon, threw his horizontal rays upon the distant peaks. But, alas! they showed up as nothing but a blur upon the finder. St. John, comparatively speaking, looked like a snug, comfortable little place, but hardly such a one as a man would voluntarily choose to winter in, as do a colony of hardy sealers. The harbor seems to be formed by a neck of land projecting out from the right-hand side of the entrance, upon the verge of which we perceived the diminutive light-house which guides the rugged South Shetland seal-catchers into safety. On the port hand going in, over against the light-house, rises a lofty cone composed of a single huge crag, standing sentry-like over the safe harbor within; while roundabout on all sides tower great, dark, scowling mountains and vast precipices, the harbor being in reality naught but a cleft in the hills, after the manner of a Scandinavian fjord. Yet the wild beauty of the place enchants one, and long before we had lost sight of the little light-house I had acknowledged to my wife that, after all, the thought of a winter spent in St. John was not such a very dreadful one, for the fascination of Nature in her grander forms far outweighs bodily inconveniences; it is safe to say that von Humboldt in the deep recesses of the Ecuadorian Andes and Hooker in the awful solitudes of the Himalayas often longed for even the rude comforts provided in a settlement like St. John.