I was up on deck at the earliest dawn of day.  The steamer was at anchor close before the city, and I looked with no admiring eyes upon its flimsy white-washed houses and wooden spires, scattered about the base and sides of the cindery, earth-quaky hills upon which it is built.  There was hardly a blade of grass or tree to be seen anywhere, except where the thriving European and American residents had perched themselves on one of the acclivities.  The dwarfed trees here, moreover, all in a row before the little painted bird-cage-looking houses, appeared to have no more life of growth and color in them than so many painted semblances in a toy village.  Familiar looking shanties, of the tumble-down sort, built of pine wood and shingles, crowded the ground by the water side, and indeed the low land seemed better suited to their staggering aspect than the steep acclivities.  Painted signs with English names and English words, stared familiarly from every building.  The universal “John Smith” there conspicuously posted his name and his “Bakery.”  Mine host of the “Hole in the Wall” invited the thirsty in good round Saxon to drink of his “Best Beer on Tap,” or his “Bottled Porter,” as “you pays your money and take your choice.”

The steamer was enlivened from the earliest hour by the native fishermen, who, with their fleet of canoes, had sought the shades of our dark hull, to protect them from the hot sun, which seemed to be fairly simmering the waters of the bay.  They were making most miraculous draughts of fishes.  I watched one little fellow.  He was hardly a dozen years of age, but he plied his trade with such skill and enterprise, that he nearly filled his canoe during the half hour I was watching him.  It was terrible to see with what intense energy and cruelty the little yellow devil, with bared arms blooded to the shoulders, pounced upon his prey.  With a quick jerk he pulled his fish in, then clutching it with one hand and thrusting the fingers of the other with the prompt ferocity of a young tiger into the panting gills, he tore off with a single wrench the head, and threw the body, yet quivering with life, among the lifeless heap of his victims lying at the bottom of his boat.  The sea gulls, hovering about shrieking shrilly and pouncing upon the heads and entrails as they were thrown into the water, fighting over them and gulping them down with hungry voracity, seemed to heighten this picture of the “Gentle art of angling.”

The return of the steward and chaplain with a boat load of “marketing” was a welcome surprise.  The parson, whose unquestionable taste in the aesthetics of eating had been wisely secured by the steward, dilated with great gusto upon the juicy beefsteaks, the freshness of the fish, and the richness of the fruit.  When, at breakfast, we enjoyed as salt-sea voyagers only could, the stores of fresh meat, fresh eggs, fresh butter, fresh milk, juicy grapes, white and purple, with the morning’s bloom still upon them, the peaches, the apples, the pears, the tumas (prickly pear fruit), the melons, musk and water, we acknowledged his reverence’s judgment, and gratefully thanked him for his services.