If in this favored zone the earth is pleasant underneath, nothing can be more glorious than the heavens above. Being under the parallel of 18 deg. N. lat., of course we have a full view of all the northern heavens, and of all the southern heavens, except 18 deg. about the South Pole. The rarefied atmosphere gives peculiar brilliancy to the stars; and on a clear night--and most nights are clear--the heavens are indeed flooded with white fire, while, according to the season of the year, Orion and his northern company appear with a lustre unwonted to us, or the Scorpion unfolds his sparkling length, or the Ship displays its glittering confusion of stars, or the Southern Cross rears aloft its sacred symbol. Meanwhile, well down toward the northern horizon, the pole star holds its fixed position, and the Great and the Little Bear, dipping toward the ocean wave, but not yet dipping in it, pursue their nightly revolutions. Long after sunset, and long before sunrise, night after night, the faint, nebulous gleam of the zodiacal lights stretches up toward the zenith. The shortness of the twilight frequently leaves the fugacious planet, Mercury, so seldom seen at the north, in distinct view. While Venus not merely casts a shadow in a clear night, as she does with us, but when she is brightest, actually shines through the clouds with an illumining power. Alternating with these glories of the starry firmament, the moon at the full fills the lower air with a soft, yet bright light, in which you can read without difficulty the smallest print. Under this milder illumination, the overpowering luxuriance of the landscape loses its oppressiveness, the hills assume more rounded forms, and from the general obscurity, the palms, a tree made for moonlight, stand out in soft distinctness. At such a time we forget the foul crimes which disfigure the past, and the vices which degrade the present of this fair land, and can easily imagine ourselves in the garden where the yet unfallen progenitors of mankind walked under a firmament 'glowing with living sapphires,' and together hymned the praises of their Creator. Daylight chases away this illusion, but brings back the reality of Christian work, whose rugged but cheerful tasks replace the delicious but ineffectual dreams of Paradise Lost, by the hope of contributing, in some humble measure, toward restoring in a province of fallen earth the lineaments of Paradise Regained. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 8: This was during the Crimean war.] THE RESTORATION OF THE UNION.