Most of our readers will be familiar with the exciting story of voyages round the world; with that famous circumnavigation by Magellan, which first found an ocean-way between the West and the East, and carried a furrow across the broad waters of the Pacific; that scarcely less famous circumnavigation of Drake's, which made the English flag known on the southern seas; that great voyage of Cook's, which added so many lands, hitherto unknown, to the map of the inhabited globe, down to later circumnavigations, accomplished for scientific objects by ships equipped with the most perfect appliances. Storm and wreck and calm; intercourse with savages who look with wonder on the white sails that have come up from the under-world; the wash of waters upon coral-reefs; the shadow of green palms upon lonely isles; strange sea-weeds floating on the deep green wave, and flying-fish hunted by voracious foes; long days and nights spent under glowing skies, without a glimpse of land; the breathless eagerness with which some new shore is sighted--with such incidents as these we English are necessarily familiar, possessing as we do a vast and various literature of the sea. And yet our appetite never grows weary of the old, old tale; there is a romance about it which never seems to fade--like the sea itself it seems ever to present some fresh and novel aspect. And such an aspect it certainly wears when it is told by a woman, as it has been told by Lady Brassey, one of the most adventurous and agreeable of lady-voyagers. Told, too, with a literary skill and a refined taste which have greatly charmed the public, and given a permanent value to her rapid record. There is no affectation of high-wrought adventure or heroic enterprise about it. Lady Brassey describes only what she has seen--and she saw a great deal. She invents nothing and she magnifies nothing; her narrative is as plain and unvarnished as a ship's log-book. The yacht _Sunbeam_ in which Lady (she was then simply Mrs.) Brassey accomplished her voyage round the world was a screw three-masted schooner, of 530 tons, with engines of thirty-five horse-power, and a speed of 10 to 13 knots an hour. She was 157 feet in length, with an extreme breadth of twenty-seven and a-half feet. Belonging to a wealthy English gentleman, she was richly appointed, and fitted up with a luxurious splendour which would have driven wild with envy and admiration the earlier circumnavigators. Leaving Chatham on the 1st of July, 1876, she ran off Beachy Head on the following evening, dropped anchor off Cowes next morning, and early on the 6th passed through the Needles. "We were forty-three on board, all told," says Mrs. Brassey, the party then including her husband and herself and their four children, some friends, a sailing master, boatswain, carpenter, able-bodied seamen, engineers, firemen, stewards, cooks, nurse, stewardess, and lady's maid.