September 23rd.--We were to have gone to sea to-day, but "_l'homme propose_." Rumours of an approaching atmospheric disturbance had been telegraphed from Manilla, within the previous forty-eight hours. Other usual and confirmatory indications were also observed; the presence of an unusual number of jelly-fish in the harbour till the sea stank with them; the lurid appearance of the sunset sky, as if the heavens were bathed in blood; the arrival of hundreds of junks from seaward seeking shelter: all these signs summed up were considered satisfactory reasons for preparing for a typhoon--than which, I suppose, no wind is more violent and destructive. It is said that persons who have never witnessed the sublime and terrible spectacle can scarcely realize, even from the most graphic descriptions of eye witnesses, what a typhoon really means. A Chinaman informed me that the last typhoon destroyed not less than 18,000 persons in this neighbourhood alone--not a large number when we bear in mind the enormous floating populations in Chinese towns. All the day the air was ominous of a coming something. At noon I asked a Chinaman when it might be expected. His answer shewed me how even this mighty destroyer is guided by a far mightier hand--"Suppose he no' com now, he com by'm by, nine clock." Well, "he" did not come now; but at 9 p.m.--and almost simultaneous with the firing of the gun--it came on to blow; but, mercifully, not a typhoon, only the spent violence of one. Even this necessitated the letting go a second anchor and the steaming head on to it, for upwards of five hours. With the morning the gale had considerably abated, and as the barometer was on the rise, and the captain impatient to clear out, we put to sea. But clearly the weather was in a very unsettled state, and outside Amoy the glass again went down with a rising head sea. That we might put into Amoy for shelter, all the furnaces were called into requisition; so we lashed into and almost buried ourselves in seas rearing themselves up a-head of us like walls of solid glass. We brought up in the outer harbour just as the shades of night and the roar of the coming storm gathered around us. That night the wind and sea played fast and furious with our ship; again we had escaped a typhoon--it was subsequently ascertained that one did actually visit the adjacent coasts and sea; but, as this wind travels in a circle of many miles diameter, with its greatest force distributed near its circumference, its centre only passed over Amoy. On steaming seaward the next morning desolation, destruction, and wreck were everywhere manifest.