The fresh green shores of this glorious island lay before us, fringed with white surf, as the everlasting ocean in its approach to it gradually changed its dark blue colour, as the water shoaled, into a bright joyous green under the blazing sun, as if in sympathy with the genius of the fair land, before it tumbled at his feet its gently swelling billows, in shaking thunders on the reefs and rocky face of the coast, against which they were driven up in clouds, the incense of their sacrifice. The undulating hills in the vicinity were all, either cleared, and covered with the greenest verdure that imagination can picture, over which strayed large herds of cattle, or with forests of gigantic trees, from amongst which, every now and then, peeped out some palm thatched mountain settlement, with its small thread of blue smoke floating up into the calm clear morning air, while the blue hills in the distance rose higher and higher, and more and more blue, and dreamy, and indistinct, until their rugged summits could not be distinguished from the clouds through the glimmering hot haze of the tropics. “By the mark seven,” sung out the leadsman in the starboard chains. “Quarter less three,” responded he in the larboard, showing that the inequalities of the surface at the bottom of the sea, even in the breadth of the ship, were at least as abrupt as those presented above water by the sides of the natural canal into which we were now running. By this time, on our right hand, we were within pistol shot of the Moro, where the channel is not above fifty yards across; indeed there is a chain, made fast to a rock on the opposite side, that can be hove up by a capstan until it is level with the water, so as to constitute an insurmountable obstacle to any attempt to force an entrance in time of war. As we stood in, the golden flag of Spain rose slowly on the staff at the Water Battery, and Cast its large sleepy folds abroad in the breeze; but, instead of floating over mailclad men, or Spanish soldiers in warlike array, three poor devils of half naked mulattoes stuck their heads out of an embrasure under its shadow. “Senor Capitan,” they shouted, ‘una Botella de Roma, por el honor del pais.’ We were mighty close upon leaving the bones of the old ship here, by the by; for at the very instant of entering the harbour’s mouth, the land wind checked us off, and very nearly hove us broadside on upon the rocks below the castle, against which the swell was breaking in thunder. “Let go the anchor,” sung out the captain.