After being frozen up and snowed under, during a very bitter and boisterous January, we at last got to sea, and soon ran into warmer weather. Our first stop was at the French West India island Guadeloupe, and there I had set for me amusingly that key-note of travelling experience which most have encountered. I was dining at a cafe, and after dinner got into conversation with an officer of the garrison. I asked him some question about the wet weather then reigning. "C'est exceptionnel," he replied; and exceptional we found it "from Dan to Beersheba." At our next port, Ciara, there was drought when every resident said it should have rained constantly--a variation a stranger could endure; while at Rio it was otherwise peculiar--"the warmest April in years." The currents all ran contrary to the books, and the winds which should have been north hung obstinately at south. Whether for natural productions, or weather, or society, we were commonly three months too late or two months too soon; or, as one of "ours" put it, we should have come in the other monsoon. Nevertheless, it was impossible for youth and high spirits to follow our schedule and not find it spiced to the full with the enjoyment of novelty; if not in season, at least well seasoned. However, every one travels nowadays, and it is time worse than wasted to retell what many have seen. But do many of our people yet visit our intended second port, that most beautiful bay of Rio de Janeiro? I fancy not. It is far out of the ordinary line, and the business immigration to South America is much more from Europe than from our own continent; but, having since visited many harbors, in many lands, I incline to agree with my old captain of the _Congress_, there is none that equals Rio, viewed from the anchorage. Like Japan, I was happy enough to see Rio before it had been much improved, while the sequestered, primitive, tropical aspect still clung to it. I suppose the red-tiled roofs still rise as before from among the abundant foliage and the orange-trees, in the suburb of Bota Fogo; that the same deliciously suggestive smell of the sugar and rum hogsheads hangs about the streets; that the long, narrow Rua do Ouvidor is still brilliant with its multicolored feather flowers; and that at night the innumerable lights dazzle irregularly upward, like the fireflies which also there abound, over the hill-sides and promontories that so charmingly break the shore line. But already in 1867 the strides since 1860 were strikingly visible. In the earlier year I used frequently to visit a friend living at Nichtherohy, on the opposite shore of the bay. The ferriage then was by trig, long, sharp-bowed, black paddle steamers, with raking funnels. They were tremendously fussy, important, puffing little chaps, with that consequential air which so frequently accompanies moderate performance. The making a landing was a complicated and tedious job, characterized by the same amount of