Pass now from the Pacific to the Indian Ocean.  There is the little rocky island of St. Paul, situated in the same latitude as Cape Town and Melbourne; and, planted with singular accuracy equidistant from the two, it is the only place of shelter in the long route between them.  Its harbor, if harbor it may be called, is the most secure, the most secluded, and the most romantic, perhaps, in the whole world.  St. Paul is of volcanic origin.  It is, indeed, little more than an extinct crater with a narrow rim of land around it to separate it from the sea.  Through this rim the waters of the great Indian Ocean have cut a channel.  The crater has thus become a beautiful salt lake, a mile in diameter, clear, deep, almost circular, and from whose border, on every side, rise the old volcanic walls draped in verdure.  The strait connecting it with the sea is but three hundred feet wide, and at high tide ten feet deep,—­thus affording an easy passage for small vessels into this most delightful seclusion; and no doubt the strait might be so deepened as to float the largest ships.  St. Paul is not at present much frequented.  But in a sea which is every year becoming more populous with the commerce of every nation, who shall tell what such a central station may become?  Its title was somewhat uncertain.  England thought she held it as a dependency of Mauritius.  But in 1847 the governor of Bourbon, with a happy audacity, took possession of it, as an outpost of his own island, and planted a little French colony of fishermen.  We have not heard that the assumption has been disputed.

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No doubt, most of our readers may have observed in the daily prints occasional allusions to the French War in Cochin China.  Probably few have understood the full meaning of the facts so quietly chronicled.  Perhaps none have dreamed that they were reading the first notices of a new Eastern conquest, which, in extent and importance, may yet be second only to that which has already been achieved by the British in Hindostan.  Yet so it is.  The Cambodia is the largest river in Southern Asia, and, together with the smaller and parallel river of Saigon, drains a tract of not less than five hundred thousand square miles.  The region for which the French have been contending includes the provinces which cluster around the mouths of these two rivers, and command them.  No position could be happier.  For while on the one hand it controls the outlet of a river stretching up into a rich and fertile country eighteen hundred miles, on the other it projects into the Chinese Sea at a point nearly midway between Singapore and Hong Kong, and so secures to its possessor a just influence in that commercial highway.  The ostensible cause of the war in this region was the murder of a French missionary.  If this was ever the real cause, it long since gave way to a settled purpose of conquest.