Blenheim Reach is about ninety miles from Hong Kong, and fifteen from Canton, whose port, together with Whampoa Reach, separated from it by paddy-field islands, it may be called. It was up this passage that the English ship “Blenheim” went to Canton, and was enabled to turn the enemy’s flank during the late war. Ahead of us laid the huge old East Indiamen, looking like line-of-battle ships, and waiting till they got aboard their twenty thousand chests, and not far from them the _Aberdeen clippers_, which may take rank as such only when the _American_ clippers are away. At Whampoa, off a collection of most forbidding-looking houses, built over the muddy water, composing the Chinese town, there lay the foreign ships, the mandarin watch-boats, the junks, the chop-hulks from which stores are supplied, the protestant and catholic floating-bethels for the good of souls, and the well-armed opium-schooners whose cargoes destroy bodies. We laid in Blenheim Reach under the whole, hissing, hot sun of August and September. There being a heavy fresh in the river at the time of our arrival, the banks were overflown, and our ship did not swing at her anchors for some days. Old China street at Canton was a foot under water, and you reached the entrance to the hongs through the foreign garden, in a sedan-chair, or on the backs of wading coolies. During the height of the swollen current, dead Chinamen floated down and hung in our wheels; and when the water subsided, the exhalation of fields of alluvial black mud, and the visits of furious flowery-kingdom mosquitoes, who, like the ghostly breeches of Mickey Free’s father, were ever going between us and sleep, neither contributed to the healthfulness nor comfort of our anchorage. Our comforts were further increased by looking upon scenery which was unrelieved except by a litchee grove here and there. The weather was terribly hot, and if the thermometer had been longer, it would have probably been hotter; with ratan-mat and bamboo-pillow you sought a spot under the awnings of the hurricane or poop deck, that you might half-restless and half-snoozing pass the night, while during the day the windsails were of little use, and drop and drop came down the tar from the rigging. Boils and other cutaneous eruptions affected the crew, with annoyances greater than those of Job, and yet they had not the salubrious climate of a Palestine in which to endure them. The dislocating-jaw beef, and fowls, and fresh food furnished us by the Chinamen, together with watery vegetables, nearly destitute of any nutritious qualities, were only partly compensated for by the half-fresh cherrymoya, custard-apple, banana, or splendid persimmon—persimmons splendid! Sometimes we would have a thunder-storm which would purify the atmosphere for a time, but back would soon come the stagnated, sweltering temperature, which neither _white_ slippers nor grass-cloth could make more comfortable,