continually being driven off by the thieving enemy. A stroll through the botanical garden remunerates one very well. The exotics are rare and tastefully displayed, while the Fuchias and the Cape Jasmin laden the air with sweet perfume. The wheat of the colony is ground in steam-mills situated in the midst of the city. Having had the good fortune to have such weather as we could coal ship in, and also employed carpenters to build frames for the protection of our fire-room hatches, against the water which might extinguish our fires, should we have the misfortune to undergo one of the severe gales that are so frequently met with in the ocean which we had to traverse before reaching our next port, we sent our letter-bag to a merchant-ship bound to Boston, raised anchor on the 3d of February, and steamed away out, passing the Lion’s Rump, False Bay, and Cape Hanglip, bound to the Isle of France, or as now called, the Mauritius. On getting a short distance from the place we encountered a mountainous, foamless swell, which did not break, but rolled up to a very great height with regularity. Our ship was sluggish in the extreme, and when we slid slowly down into the trough of the sea, the wave before and behind us was apparently as high as our mizzen top. The colors of a ship hoisted at her mizzen peak, but only a short way off, at times, were entirely shut in from our view by the swell. If this sea had only broken it would have proved the propriety of the old Dutch name for the cape—“the Stormy cape.” In rounding the cape the fate of the unfortunate “Birkenhead,” an English transport steamer, lost off it some years ago by running on a sunken rock, came to mind; and we also thought of the collected bravery of the large number of troops on board of her. It is one thing to face death from the belching mouth of cannon or the deadly rifle, for then a man is hurried on by the clangor and excitement of the strife, and moves under the illusory belief that makes more than half the soldiers of the world, that somebody else may be killed, but that he will not. But what is to be said in praise of the placid courage of the poor soldiers on the Birkenhead, who, with death inevitable, not amid “the sulphurous canopy,” but death from the yawning wave _facing them_, yet fell into rank at the roll of drum, as if on a dress-parade, and sank into the yesty deep with the engulfed vessel, patterns of discipline and martyrs to duty.