“14th of March, 1842. I have visited Passage Fort at a season when Wild-ducks are stretching from one side of the Bay to the other in strings, and Plovers and Sandpipers are feeding in little flocks on the beach. The nights and the mornings are quiet, but the day is one uninterrupted bluster of the sea-breeze. The country is dry. Many of the large trees are leafless, and there is no verdure in the grass. Such a picture would seem to afford no great diversity for amusement: the sea, however, is always an interesting object. Whether calm or stirring it has a variety of features, all different at different hours of the day. The repose of morning; the slumbering ocean; the sleepy mountains kerchiefed in clouds; the awakened daylight peeping through the curtains of night; the birds just risen and moving; the little flocks wending about as if the day had its business to attend to; the Herons and Egrets shaking their wings by the mirrory waters, and making their toilet there. All this is a pleasant mixture of repose and activity; of the stir from sleeping to waking; in which nature is never seen to such advantage, as in the magnitude of a view that mingles the ocean with the earth. “The day is gathering brighter and brighter; but the mountains rise between me and the sun, and are one dull blue mass, neither deeply nor faintly blue, but clear, and yet obscure. On the beach the fishermen are silently hauling their seine, sweeping, with its line of dotted corks, such a circuit on the waters, that it seems to take in half the bay. At a distance off, the flats loaded with grass are getting under weigh. Busy men and women are on the beach launching canoes and preparing for the market. The sails are hoisted, and the masses, that lay like logs upon the water, just stir, and glide out into the glaring bay. Amid all this hushed movement, there is one pervading sound, the murmurs of the distant breakers. This voice is seldom silent; in the stillest lull there will be heard this roll of the restless surge.——There is a sweet melancholy voice that comes from the bordering mangroves along the river: it is the morning call of the Pea-dove. It is responded to by a faint low cooing from the hill-side woods. It is repeated again and again; and again it is replied to far away. And now there are other sounds. The Crotophagas are trooping to the river-shallows, and calling to each other to settle among the sedges, where the receding tide has left them living food. There is a sound overhead like the hurtling of arrows. It is a flock of Wild-ducks flitting from the Salt Island ponds to the Lagoons on the other side the bay: and again there is another sound of gathered tribes moving through the air. It resembles bubbling waters. It is a flight of Tinklings shifting from their rookery to their feeding grounds in the morasses. Streams of smoke are curling up from various points of the mountains, like the morning sacrifices of hill-worshippers of old.