youth, and becoming once more what it was when it started on its
long journey from the Tropics towards the Pole. As it rushes back
across the ocean, thrilled and expanded by the heat, it opens its
dry and thirsty lips to suck in the damp from below, till, saturated
once more with steam, it will reach the tropic as a gray rain-laden
sky of North-East Trade.

So we slipped on, day after day, in a delicious repose which yet was
not monotonous. Those, indeed, who complain of the monotony of a
voyage must have either very few resources in their own minds, or
much worse company than we had on board the Shannon. Here, every
hour brought, or might bring, to those who wished, not merely
agreeable conversation about the Old World behind us, but fresh
valuable information about the New World before us. One morning,
for instance, I stumbled on a merchant returning to Surinam, who had
fifty things to tell of his own special business--of the woods, the
drugs, the barks, the vegetable oils, which he was going back to
procure--a whole new world of yet unknown wealth and use. Most
cheering, too, and somewhat unexpected, were the facts we heard of
the improving state of our West India Colonies, in which the tide of
fortune seems to have turned at last, and the gallant race of
planters and merchants, in spite of obstacle on obstacle, some of
them unjust and undeserved, are winning their way back (in their own
opinion) to a prosperity more sound and lasting than that which
collapsed so suddenly at the end of the great French war. All spoke
of the emancipation of the slaves in Cuba (an event certain to come
to pass ere long) as the only condition which they required to put
them on an equal footing with any producers whatsoever in the New
World.