admiration of any one but persons situated as we were. But by us such scenes were regarded only as the annoying indications of the calm which delayed our progress and wasted our coals. To say that it was calm is not doing full justice to it; there was not a breath in the air, and the water was as smooth as a mill-pond. Even the wake of the ship scarce ruffled the surface; and the gulls which had visited us almost daily, and to which our benevolent liberality had dispensed innumerable pieces of pork, threw an almost unbroken shadow upon it as they stooped in their flight to pick up the largest and most tempting. It was generally remarked that cable-laying under such circumstances would be mere child's play. In spite of the unusual calmness of the weather in general, there were days on which our former unpleasant experiences of the Atlantic were brought forcibly to our recollection, when it blew hard and the sea ran sufficiently high to reproduce on a minor scale some of the discomforts of which the previous cruise had been so fruitful. Those days, however, were the exception and not the rule, and served to show how much more pleasant was the inconvenient calm than the weather which had previously prevailed. The precise point of the rendezvous--marked by a dot on the chart--was reached on the evening of Wednesday, July 28th, just eleven days after our departure from Queenstown. The voyage out was a lazy one. Now things are different, and we no longer hear of the prospects of the heroes and heroines of the romances and novels which have formed the staple food for animated discussion for some days past. The rest of the squadron were in sight at nightfall, but at such a considerable distance that it was past ten o'clock on the morning of Thursday the 29th, before the Agamemnon joined them. Some time previous to reaching the rendezvous the engineer-in-chief (Mr. Bright) went up in the shrouds on the lookout for the other ships, and accordingly had to "pay his footing"--much to the amusement of his staff. Most of them being more advanced in years would not probably have been so equal to the task in an athletic sense. After the ordinary laconic conversation which characterize code flag-signals, we were as usual greeted by a perfect storm of questions as to what had kept us so much behind our time, and learned that all had come to the conclusion that the ship must have got on shore on leaving Queenstown harbor. The Niagara, it appeared, had arrived at the rendezvous on Friday night, the 23d, the Valorous on Sunday, the 25th, and the Gorgon on the afternoon of Tuesday, the 27th.