Though those travellers who take passage by the slow and infrequent “intermediate” steamers to the Cape are usually afforded an opportunity of setting foot on Saint Helena's soil, the brief stay which is made there permits of their doing little else. As the house occupied by Napoleon stands in the very heart of the island and on its highest point, and as the road which leads to it is so rough and precipitous that those who hire one of the few available vehicles generally walk most of the way out of pity for the horses, there is rarely time for the traveller who intends proceeding by the same boat to set eyes on the spot which gives the island its fame. I heard, indeed, of scores of travellers who had chosen the discomforts of this roundabout and tedious route for the express purpose of visiting the house where Napoleon died, and who found, on arriving at Saint Helena, that they would have time for nothing more than a hurried promenade in the town. Nor are any efforts made by the indolent islanders to induce travellers to stay over a steamer, for there are neither hotels nor boarding-houses, and a visitor would have to depend for his bed and board on the hospitality of some private family. The South Atlantic, her bosom rising and falling lazily under the languorous influence of the tropic morning, had exchanged her sombre night robe for a shimmering, sparkling garment of sun-flecked blue before the sleepy-eyed quarantine officer had laboriously climbed the port ladder; and the yellow flag at our masthead, fluttering down, had signalled to the clamorous crews of negroes waiting eagerly alongside that they could take us ashore. In the pitiless light of the early morning the island looked even more forbidding than when the harshness of its features was veiled by night. Naked slope and ridge rose everywhere, and everywhere they were cut and cross-cut by equally bare valleys and ravines, but not a house, not a tree, not a sign of life, vegetable or animal, could we detect as we drew near. Even the sea-birds seemed afraid to alight on those grim cliffs, darting in on outspread wings as though to settle on them, only to wheel away with frightened, discordant cries, the while an everlasting surf hurled itself angrily against the smooth black rocks, voicing its impotence in a sullen, booming roar.