any.--The two cities of La Plata are at
loggerheads again.--When Monte Video gets fat, Buenos Ayres grows
lean.--It has been found necessary to transfer the cargo of the
_Regina-Coeli_, which has been condemned at Callao.--Cocoas go off
briskly.--Caraque bags are quoted at one hundred and thirty-four, and
Trinidad's at seventy-three.--It appears that at the review in the Champ
de Mars, the people cried, 'Down with the ministers!'--The raw salt
Saladeros hides are selling--ox-hides at sixty francs, and cows' at
forty-eight.--Have they passed the Balkan?--What is Diebitsch
about?--Aniseed is in demand at San Francisco. Plagniol olive oil is
quiet.--Gruyere cheese, in bulk, is thirty-two francs the
quintal.--Well, is Leon XII. dead?" etc., etc.

All these things were talked about and commented on aloud. At the table
of the custom-house and coast-guard officers they spoke in a lower key.

Matters of police and revenue on the coast and in the ports require, in
fact, a little more privacy, and a little less clearness in the
conversation.

The sea-captains' table was presided over by an old captain of a large
vessel, M. Gertrais-Gaboureau. M. Gertrais-Gaboureau could hardly be
regarded as a man; he was rather a living barometer. His long life at
sea had given him a surprising power of prognosticating the state of the
weather. He seemed to issue a decree for the weather to-morrow. He
sounded the winds, and felt the pulse, as it were, of the tides. He
might be imagined requesting the clouds to show their tongue--that is
to say, their forked lightnings. He was the physician of the wave, the
breeze, and the squall. The ocean was his patient. He had travelled
round the world like a doctor going his visits, examining every kind of
climate in its good and bad condition. He was profoundly versed in the
pathology of the seasons. Sometimes he would be heard delivering himself
in this fashion--"The barometer descended in 1796 to three degrees below
tempest point." He was a sailor from real love of the sea. He hated
England as much as he liked the ocean. He had carefully studied English
seamanship, and considered himself to have discovered its weak point. He
would explain how the _Sovereign_ of 1637 differed from the _Royal
William_ of 1670, and from the _Victory_ of 1775. He compared their
build as to their forecastles and quarter-decks. He looked back with
regret to the towers upon the deck, and the funnel-shaped tops of the
_Great H