Cape Town, from the water, looks like a long, low, yellow fortification. Its population is about thirty thousand, made up of the representatives of nearly every nation. It was captured from the Dutch by the English in 1806. Being the great stopping-place for vessels bound round the Cape of Good Hope, or returning from Australia and the East Indies, the occupations of the inhabitants are mostly mercantile. The streets are wide and well laid out. They have a number of fine churches, a botanical garden, and quite an extensive library. High behind the town, flanked on either side by the conical hills of the “Lion’s Rump” and “Devil’s hill,” rises that remarkable formation, which is visible a great distance from the sea, called _Table Mountain_, four thousand feet high, and level on the top. The weather is nearly always unsettled, but a blow may be expected when the inhabitants remind you that the “cloth is spread” on Table mountain, which is suddenly covered with a thick white cloud, which curls over the steep face of the mountain, and extends itself down it, as a deep snow from the roof of a house when the melting begins. When this continues, the ships in the harbor, which is a very unsafe one, look to their moorings, and are frequently driven ashore. The day after our arrival we were compelled to change our berth: the old Mississippi reared and plunged at her anchors like an impatient steed endeavoring to slip his rein, and at night the royal mail steamer Bosphorus broke from her moorings and went ashore. We were unable to go to her assistance because the weather had prevented our getting any coal aboard. [Illustration: _LITH. OF SARONY & Co. NEW YORK._ CAPE OF GOOD HOPE.] As your boat approaches the mole, you pass through large flocks of the black gull and cormorant, and nearer the shore, groups of the pelican are feeding. Should a southeast wind prevail when you reach the wharf, you will scarcely be able to see the place. Dense clouds, not of dust, but of coarse red sand, fill the streets, and are borne in fitful eddies around the corners. It fills your eyes, if you are so rash as to open them but for a second, your ears, nostrils, and insinuates itself underneath every garment that you wear; you are doing the penance of walking with gravel under your sock, although sandal-shoon be on. The male residents who move about wear veils attached to their hats, but to a stranger the annoyance is horrible. During the prevalence of this wind, the houses are closed as well as they may be, but it is insufficient to keep out the plague. In the parlor-windows of an English hotel at which I dined, the dust had accumulated in a morning to the thickness of velvet, and from the front of the house I saw a Hottentot servant removing the sand piled on the pavement, as we would a small snow-drift in our own country.