Spanish Consilio de las Indias, must take some
of the blame in this matter. What on earth
made them call those American, or rather
Columbian islands, Indian ones? I have never
surmounted the early perplexity which beset me on
the subject, and to this day it is to me
incomprehensible why the passage from Halifax to
Bermuda should be such a short and easy one;
you ought to go round the Cape, surely, to the
Indies.

Round again went the tee-totum, and the tip
of its tiny staff pointed to the Southern Atlantic.
"Havana" was inscribed on the uppermost
facet. Again I packed my bundles, and, taking
passage in a United States mail steamer, sped
past Charleston, the which luckless city General
Gillmore was then actively engaged in warming
with Greek fire, and which Northern preachers
were cheerfully and charitably comparing every
Sunday to Sodom and Gomorrah. On the third
day we were close on the Gulf Stream, and the
usual feat of parlour or rather gangway magic
was performed by a boatswain's mate, who
lowered a bucket of water over the side, and
bade us plunge our hands in it. It was cold as
ice. Twenty minutes afterwards he lowered the
bucket again, drew up more water, and bade us
dip. We did, and the water was tepid, almost
warm. There was an increase of thirty degrees in
temperature, and we were in that stream which
an irate American politician once threatened to
dam up and divert from the shores of England,
thus leaving us "out in the cold," and freezing
perfidious Albion to the glacial mean of
Spitzbergen.

Three times—I do not understand the mysteries
of navigation—we crossed the Gulf Stream.
We skirted the coast of Florida so closely that
we could see the pines that made a grim horizon
to that swampy shore—so closely, that you
might almost fancy you could see Secession in
arms shaking its fists at the stars and stripes
we carried. All this country was at the time to
which I refer a land tabooed and accursed in
Northern eyes. It was the coast of a rebellious
state. Below St. Augustines, half way between
that and Key West, we saw the coral reefs and
the Everglades. Coral reefs, I may observe,
do not make so pretty a show on the coast of
Florida as the material does, in the form of
bracelets and earrings, in the jewellers' windows
in Cockspur-street. In fact, a prudent ship-
master keeps as far away from the coral reefs
as he possibly can.

We should also have sighted Cape Florida
Light and Carysfort Light; but the
Confederates having carefully put the lights out,
to favour blockade-running and perplex their
enemies as far as they could, it was rather
ticklish navigation after sunset. However, it
is but a few days' voyage from New York to
Cuba, and we had a tight ship and great
confidence in our captain. Occasionally, when
the look-out man signalled a sail, there was a
slight exhibition of nervousness among the
passengers. The loyal immediately assumed
the stranger to be the Alabama—not yet
scuttled by the Kearsage off Cherbourg—and
indulged in dire forebodings that within two
hours the steamer's chronometers would be
ticking in the cabin of Captain Raphael Semmes,
C.S.A., the ship burnt or bonded, and themselves
carried off to some port in the White Sea or
the Indian Archipelago, thence to find their
way to their destination as best they could.
The disloyal, of whom I am afraid we had a
considerable proportion among our passengers,
generally jumped at the conclusion that the
speck on the horizon, momentarily growing
larger, was a Yankee gunboat specially detached
from the blockading squadron to overhaul us.
What sudden declarations there were of "whole
hog" Union sentiments!—what divings into
state-rooms, there presumably to make such
little matters as revolvers, Confederate
commissions, and rebel mail-bags, snug! The
captain was a discreet man, Union to the back-
bone, but not inveterate against the opposite
party. We had one passenger on board who,
for all the privacy in which he kept, and the
very large cloak in which he wrapped himself,
was unmistakably, inside and out, Southern
Greyback and Seash. To this gentleman in
political difficulties I heard our worthy captain
remark one morning, "My Christian friend,
I'll tell you what it is. As soon as we get
inside the Morro I should advise you to clear
out of one of the starboard ports, and never stop
running till we've got steam up again. The
smell of Uncle Sam's mail-bags ain't good for
you. It ain't indeed." The which, I take it,
was very sensible, and at the same time very
kind-hearted counsel.

All this time, while we were eating and
drinking, and lounging and smoking, and
dawdling over books and newspapers, and card-
playing, and listening to the grand pianoforte in
the saloon, which was exemplarily punished at
least a dozen times a day by Mrs. Colonel
Spankie and Miss Alexandra McStinger, lady
passengers—and pretending that the time hung
heavily on our hands, when, to tell the truth,
sluggards as we were, we revelled in our
laziness—there was going on all around us, and to
a certain extent in our very selves, a curiously
phenominal process called Transformation. You
have read poor Hawthorn's delicious book; you
have read Faust, with an English crib; you have
seen Lucas Cranach's picture of the Fontaine
de Jouvence in the Berlin gallery? Well, we
and our surroundings had become transformed.
I had left New York in the middle of January,
and in the rigidest throes of a Northern winter.
The snow lay thick in the streets. They were
skating on the lake in the central Park. There
were midnight sleighing-parties on the
Bloomingdale-road. The steamers on the North
river had frozen fringes on the water-lines of
their timbers, like the callous raggedness thrown
out from the ends of a fractured bone; and you
could see the very shapes of the ferry-boats'
hulls cut out in the quickly parting ice that
gathered about the landing-place. I had left Pier
No. Seventy-seven, bottom of I forget which