“All Fools’ Day” is not forgotten on shipboard. The better to remember it in the younger messes, it is set apart for the celebration of the caterer’s birthday (of course the caterer is born on that day); the table is spread in the best way, and not until the caterer’s health has been proposed in sherry—“a bumpers and no heel-taps”—and the wine-glasses emptied, does the choking sensation remind the uninitiated that he has bolted a wine-glass of rather strong whiskey. In two or three days the weather suddenly changed to blanket temperature; we ran into a heavy head sea; the spray was chilly, and the sun sank as if in the cold gray of autumn. On the morning of the 6th April, the Ladrone islands appeared in sight, and we ran into a fleet of some three hundred Chinese fishing boats—we were off the shores of the Middle Kingdom. The sight of these awkward boats, with their build, showing what travellers to Cathay have called the celestial propensity to “reverse” everything, was an interesting one. But why say the Chinese reverse? They had a national existence, when these our moderns were not even in embryo; their laws had an existence long before the code of Lycurgus was promulged, and their hieroglyphic record goes away back to a period which our own sacred revelation does not compass, so it is we who reverse. John Chinaman knows that though the stern of his boat is broad and high; that its bow runs wedge-like and low; that his masts, instead of raking aft, lean forward; and if his boat, under sail, look as if she was going to run under, still that she has borne him safely when many a “ty-fung” blew. We wished a pilot, but in answer to the inquiry whether any could furnish one, they nodded assent, and held up fish and some rice. The weather being thick we ran in under one of the Ladrones and anchored for the night in thirty fathoms water, and fired a gun for a pilot. The next morning at daybreak, we ran in and anchored in the roadstead of the old Portuguese city of Macao, about four miles from the shore. Though the turbid water all around, and the naked islands that encompassed the anchorage, did not afford a prospect calculated to prepossess one with his first glance at the “Flowery Kingdom,” still we had a feeling of gladness that after an almost uninterrupted run of over four months we had reached our goal, or the region which was to be the theatre of our movements—yes, for months.