This island is, you know, the scene of St. Pierre’s beautiful story of Paul and Virginia, over which I suppose most people have sentimentalised at one time or another of their lives.  Until we reached here I did not know that the tale was like the lady’s improver—­a fiction founded on fact, and that Paul and Virginia were at one time flesh and blood, and that their veritable dust was buried at Pamplemousses in a spot considered as one of the lions of the place, and visited as classic ground.  Now, though I never was greatly given to the tender and sentimental, and have not had any tendencies that way greatly increased by the elegancies and courtesies of a midshipman’s berth,—­not to say that, as far as I recollect, Mdlle.  Virginia was a bit of a prude, and M. Paul a pump,—­yet were it but for old acquaintance sake, I determined on making a pilgrimage.  Pamplemousses is a small village about seven miles from Port Louis, and the road to it is lined by rows of tamarind trees, of cocoanut trees, and sugarcanes.  I started early in the morning in order to avoid the great heat of the middle of the day, and having breakfasted at Port Louis, made an early couple of hours’ walk of it, meeting on my way numbers of the coloured population hastening to market in all the varieties of their curious Hindoo costume.  After some trouble I found my way to the “Tombeaux” as they call them.  They are situated in a garden at the back of a house now in the possession of one Mr. Geary, an English mechanist, who puts up half the steam engines for the sugar mills in the island.  The garden is now an utter wilderness, but still very beautiful; round it runs a grassy path, and in the middle of the path on each side towards the further extremity of the garden is a funeral urn supported on a pedestal, and as dilapidated as the rest of the affair.  These dilapidations, as usual, are the work of English visitors, relic-hunters, who are as shameless here as elsewhere.  I was exceedingly pleased on the whole with my excursion, and when I returned I made a drawing of the place, which I will send some day or other.

Since this I have made, in company with our purser and a passenger, Mr. King, a regular pedestrian trip to see some very beautiful falls up the country.

[Leaving Mauritius on May 17, they prolonged their voyage to Sydney by being requisitioned to take more specie to Hobart Town, so that Sydney was not reached until July 16, eight months since they had had news of home.

The three months spent in this first visit to Sydney proved to be one of the most vital periods in the young surgeon’s career.  From boyhood up, vaguely conscious of unrest, of great powers within him working to find expression, he had yet been to a certain extent driven in upon himself.  He had been somewhat isolated from those of his own age by his eagerness for problems about which they cared nothing; and the tendency to solitude, the habit of outward reserve imposed upon an unusually warm nature,