"Scenting the land, to be sure," replied Bartelot, as the three descended to the cabin. "You are a clever seaman, Tom, and have made the land to a minute, at the time you foretold a week ago." Bartelot laughed, and said: "Father wanted me to go into the navy, where he said I was certain to shine, as I never was out of scrapes and turmoils at school and at home; but I had no ambition. What does old Topham's song end with?" and pouring out his grog, Bartelot began to sing: "'Ambition, they tell me, has charms for us all, But well I'm convinced they are charms that must pall; The pageant of splendour may lure for a while, But soon we grow sick of its weight and its toil; Nor can it compare with us, Morley, my boy, Whose appetites strengthen the more we enjoy. Then deign ye, kind powers! with this wish to comply-- May I always be drinking, yet always be dry!'" After the long voyage, sixty-four miles from the Cabo to Rio seemed a trifle to Morley. He strove to be thankful and content in his heart, that the first portion of his watery pilgrimage was nearly accomplished, and that he had now attained what was rather more than the beginning of a future end. By 5 P.M. they were within seven miles of the land, and the rocky Cabo, a vast insular mass of granite, which terminates a long range of mountains, was glowing redly in the light of the Brazilian sun. The highest summit there has an altitude of more than 1,500 feet; the sea and sky around were both serene and beautiful. The water possessed a strangely pure and crystalline aspect; so much so, that at times the bed, or what appeared to be the bed of the ocean, was visible, but this was only the flowers of the sea. Long and mysterious plants (the _Nereocystis_), which, with a stem no thicker than a spunyarn, grow from their roots in the deep bed of the ocean to the length of 300 feet and more, and have at their upper end a huge bulbous-shaped vesicle, filled with air, which floats upon the surface, or near it, and from this bulb there springs a thick crown of dusky leaves. These tremendous marine vegetables are more commonly found on the north-western than on the eastern shores of America, but many are to be seen at times off the coast of the southern continent. Elsewhere Morley's eye could discern masses of rock or coral reefs, that rose to within fifty or sixty feet of the surface, showing a freight of shellfish, sea-anemones, wondrous creeping things, and fibrous tufts of giant seaweed. But the scene changed with tropical rapidity, when with midnight there came on sudden black squalls, with heavy rain, deep hoarse thunder, and vivid red lightning, that seemed to flash and play about the granite summits of the Cabo Frio with a brilliance that eclipsed the gleam of its lighthouse, which marks now where our frigate, the _Thetis_, perished.