We have, generally speaking, had hot winds from Africa, and there is a sultry feel in the air which the state of the thermometer hardly accounts for. I perceive that the sails are all tinged with a reddish colour; and wherever a rope has chafed upon them, they appear almost as if iron-moulded. This the captain and officers attribute to the wind from Africa. They were certainly perfectly white long after we left Rio; they have not been either furled or unbent. What may be the nature of the dust or sand that thus on the wings of the wind crosses so many miles of ocean, and stains the canvass? Can it be this minute dust affecting the lungs which makes us breathe as if in the sultry hours preceding a thunder-storm? _Dec. 3d_.--We came in sight of St. Mary's, the eastern island of the Azores. I much wished to have touched at some of these isles; but this is not a good season for doing so, and the winds we have had have been unfavourable for the purpose. This afternoon, though near enough to have seen at least the face of the land, the weather was thick and rainy, so that we saw nothing. _18th_.--After passing the Azores, a long succession of gales from the north-east kept us off the land. These were succeeded by three fine days; and the sea, which had been heavy, became smooth. Early the day before yesterday, however, it began to blow very hard from the northwest; and yesterday morning it changed to a gale from the south and south-west, and we lay-to under storm stay-sails, in a tremendous sea. About one o'clock the captain called to me, and desired me to come on deck and see what could not last ten minutes, and I might never see again. I ran up, as did Mrs. and Miss K----. A sudden shift of wind had taken place: we saw it before it came up, driving the sea along furiously before it; and the meeting of the two winds broke the sea as high as any ship's mast-head in a long line, like the breakers on a reef of rocks. It was the most beautiful yet fearful sight I ever beheld; and the sea was surging over our little vessel so as to threaten to fill her: but the hatches were battoned down; we were lying-to on a right tack, and a hawser had been passed round the bits in order to sustain the foremast, in case we lost our bowsprit, as we expected to do every instant. But in twenty minutes the gale moderated, and we bore up for Falmouth, which we reached this morning, having passed the cabin deck of a ship that doubtless had foundered in the storm of yesterday.--Once more I am in England; and, to use the words of a venerable though apocryphal writer, "Here will I make an end. And if I have done well, and as is fitting the story, it is that which I desired; but if slenderly and meanly, it is that which I could attain unto."[130] M.G. [Note 130: 2 Maccabees, chap. XV. ver. 37, 38.] APPENDIX.