k the trouble of
getting out of his bed and rowing out to us as soon as our anchor was down
to tell us, with apparently great satisfaction, that we had lost our race,
and that we should have to go into quarantine with the earliest dawn.
Having awakened all the sleepers with this soothing intelligence, and
called up a host of bitter feelings of rage and disappointment in the
heart of every one on board, this friendly voice bade us good-night, and
the owner rowed away into the gloom around, apparently at peace with
himself and all the world.

How can I set forth the indignation we all felt to be put in quarantine
because of a little insignificant epidemic of fever at D'Urban, in coming
to a place noted as a hotbed of every variety of fever? If it was measles,
or even chicken-pox, we declared we could have understood it. But _fever_!
This sentiment was found very comforting, and it was a great
disappointment to find how little convincing it appeared to the
authorities. However, the anticipation proved to have been much worse than
the reality, for as we were all perfectly well, and had been so ever since
leaving D'Urban, the quarantine laws became delightfully elastic, and in a
couple of days or so the yellow flag was hauled down, and a more gay and
cheerful bit of bunting proclaimed to our friends on shore that we were no
longer objects of fear and aversion.

In two minutes F---- is on board, and in two minutes more I am in a boat
alongside, being swiftly rowed to the flat shore of Port Louis through a
crowd of shipping, for the fine harbor of the little island seems to
attract to itself an enormous number of vessels. From Calcutta and China,
Ceylon and Madras, Pondicherry, London, Marseilles, the Cape, Callao and
Bordeaux, and from many a port besides, vessels of all varieties of rig
and tonnage come hither.

In the daytime, as I now see it for the first time, Port Louis is indeed a
crowded and busy place, and its low-pitched warehouses and
unpretending-looking buildings hold many and many thousand tons of
miscellaneous merchandise coming in or going out. But at sunset an exodus
of all the white and most of the creole inhabitants sets in, leaving the
dusty streets and dingy buildings to watchmen and coolies and dogs. It is
quite curious to notice, as I do directly, what a horror the English
residents have of sleeping even one single night in Port Louis; and this
dread certainly appears to be well founded if even half th