The weather has been, up to this, clear and pleasant, perhaps a little cold at first but now really very charming. The sea has been tolerably quiet and smooth so we have had but little sickness on board—less than I expected to see. How old I am getting though. While writing this, my feet pain me which has been the case for the last four months. Also my teeth which are mostly decayed and even my energies are dormant. I, who once set myself the great task of studying a profession—now can hardly even concentrate enough thought to note down a few sensible ideas. Yes, I am surely grown old very fast in the last three years. I can feel both in mind and body. The latter is invariably inclined to indolence. The former to downright dormancy. Oh, could I regain the play of my imagination, the buoyancy of thought which I once possessed; could I possess myself of ambition, pride, to stimulate me, all yet might be right and it is to have the former forced upon me by circumstances more or less that I reseek the scenes of my former home, hoping that in the wild and exciting race there for wealth and position I too may be roused enough to take a share. April twenty-sixth. We passed Cape St. Lucas on the night of the twenty-fourth and ran yesterday across the mouth of the Gulf of California which I believe is here one hundred and sixty miles wide. While doing so we lost sight of the coast which, however, reappeared this morning at daylight. The coast here presents a succession of ridges rising higher back towards the land—the whole, however, broken up into abrupt peaks rising from four to five hundred feet above the sea level. Occasionally a high cliff stands boldly out into the sea—its foot washed by the eternal breakers. The whole of them are covered with a short low shrubbery which is now colored in a reddish dress being in blossom at present. After running down the coast about fifty miles, we doubled a headland and turned into a short bay at the East side of which is the village of Mansenilla inhabited by Mexicans who under supervision of Government officers carry on silver mining here. The appearance of everything here, the woods, houses and men would indicate that we are in a warmer climate, if the weather did not. The people themselves wear clothing, as may be judged by its scantiness, to hide their nakedness rather than for protection against the climate. Their color is slightly coppery, almost as much so as our California Indians. Their houses too are more built as a shelter from the tropical sun than against the rigours of a cold country, they being the roughest, simplest kind of huts built out of timber and brush. We lay here about an hour during which time we sent two passengers ashore in one of our boats, while a number of natives in dugouts swarmed around the vessel, called out, I presume, more on account of the novelty of our presence than any other notion.