I have hardly ever observed a person so dull or unimaginative that his eye did not glisten as he watched a shoal of flying-fish rise from the sea, and skim along for several hundred yards.

There is something in it so totally dissimilar to everything else in other parts of the world, that our wonder goes on increasing every time we see even a single one take its flight.

The incredulity of the old Scotch woman on this head is sufficiently excusable.

"You may hae seen rivers o' milk, and mountains o' sugar," said she to her son, returned from a voyage; "but you'll ne'er gar me believe you have seen a fish that could flee!" The pleasant Trade, which had wafted us with different degrees of velocity, over a distance of more than a thousand miles, at last gradually failed.

The sails began to flap gently against the masts, so gently, indeed, that we half hoped it was caused, not so much by the diminished force of the breeze, with which we wore very unwilling to part, as by that long and peculiar swell which, "In the torrid clime Dark heaving," is productive of oscillating motion on the ship; but the faint zephyrs, which had coquetted with our languid sails for an hour or two, at length took their leave, first of the courses, then of the topsails, and lastly of the royals and the smaller flying kites aloft.