Last night was an almost perfect one, with moonlight nearly as bright as sunshine and the sky absolutely free from clouds. About the hour of sunset we witnessed what, for spectacular effects, was perhaps the finest scenery that we have had yet. At four o’clock all the mists, etc., that sailors call muck had disappeared, disclosing in its entire length of fifty miles the south side of Staten Land. This consists altogether of jagged rocks and fierce, angry peaks shooting up three thousand feet above the sea. The eastern or St. John end of the island was wrapped in gloom and shadow, while the rest of the land swept superbly down toward the west, stretching away in ridges of wonderfully fantastic beauty, the peaks near the straits soaring up grandly against a rich crimson glare where the sun had sunk behind a rift in the clouds. Gradually, however, the light was diffused over the entire western heavens, changing from soft golden tints to royal purples and scarlets, which spread over the glorious mountains a cloud-mantle almost supernatural in its marvellous hues. Imperceptibly, however, the bright colors began to wane and grow dull, shapes of dun vapor seemed to rise from the land, and at length darkness fell upon the deep and the mountains receded till engulfed in the blackness of night. The scene on deck at 8.30 was also one long to be cherished, with the joyous, rosy light of advancing day in the northeast, the full moon slowly falling, a huge golden ball, behind the western horizon, and the tall, violet pyramid of the Bell Mountain on Tierra del Fuego rising out of the sea fair and soft, far away in the northwest. Ah, no one knows what the real beauties of the sea are until he has made at least one deep-water voyage in a sailing ship! The flying glimpse of the Atlantic that one catches from the deck of a steamer or the experiences of a midwinter voyage to the Mediterranean in a North German Lloyder gives one no true idea of what ocean life really is. No; to comprehend the sea in all of its splendid phases one must live on it for months at a time; for not till then can one fully appreciate that “They that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters; these see the works of the Lord, and His wonders in the deep.”