A Day at St. Helena.
FROM THE LOG-BOOK OF MY HOMEWARD VOYAGE.
By Bayard Taylor.
The three passengers on board of the clipper-ship Sea-Serpent, bound from Whampoa to New-York, were greatly delighted to learn from Capt. Howland, on the day when they crossed the tropic of Capricorn, that the water was getting short, and he had therefore decided to touch at St. Helena for a fresh supply. We had already been more than sixty days on board, and the sea, with all its wonderful fascination, was growing monotonous. Here was an event which, in addition to its positive interest, would give us at least five days of anticipation and a week of active remembrance, virtually shortening our voyage to that extent; for at sea we measure time less by the calendar than by our individual sense of its duration. I have spent several months on shipboard, when, according to the almanac, barely a fortnight had elapsed.
The trade-wind bore us slowly northward, and when I went on deck at sunrise, four days afterward, St. Helena was in sight, about twenty-five miles distant. It was a dark-blue mass, filling about twenty degrees of the horizon, and of nearly uniform elevation above the sea, but gradually resolved itself into sharper and more broken outlines as we approached. Except upon a lofty terrace on the southern side, where there was a tinge of green and some traces of fields, the coast presented a frightfully rocky and inhospitable appearance. Nevertheless it displayed some grand effects of coloring. The walls of naked rock, several hundred feet high, which rose boldly
