My father was greatly disappointed when Congress, under the whip of Charles Sumner, quashed President Grant’s plan for the annexation of Santo Domingo by refusing to ratify the treaty signed by Grant and the Dominican president, Baez. The friends of annexation, however, still had hopes of bringing the little republic under the eagle’s wing; it was probably in this interest that President Baez invited my father to revisit Santo Domingo in the winter of 1872 and bring his family with him. On the ninth of February, the day of a terrible blizzard, I sailed from New York with my father, mother, and a gay company of girl cousins and friends. Our steamer, the old _Tybee_, was a small crank tub; the twelve days’ passage was more uncomfortable than any ocean crossing I have ever made. My journal records that on the second day out I had not yet taken off my boots, and that on the fifth I was undressed for the first time since sailing. The captain, a quaint Yankee skipper of the old school, was so touched by my suffering that he sent two sailors to carry me from the “Black Hole of Calcutta”, six feet by eight, where three of us languished, to his own breezy deck cabin. Here I soon began to pick up. My strongest impression of the voyage is of the beauty of the Gulf Stream, crossed in cloudless weather. The intense blue of the sea, the golden gulf weed, the dazzling color of the sky were my first taste of tropical splendors. “I am sure that water really is blue,” I said to the captain. “That color cannot be merely the sky’s reflection.” “Here, boy! Fill a bucket over the side and show it to the young lady.” The water in the bucket close at hand looked like any other, save for a strand of floating gulf weed. “They do say,” the captain volunteered, “that the yarns about mermaids grew out of some sailor’s mistaking that gulf weed for a girl’s hair.”