It was just as I had seen it long before, with nothing of its beauty lost, nothing of its charm wanting.
A change had come, but that was political, and not visible from the ship.
The monarchy of my day was gone, and a republic was sitting in its seat.
It was not a material change.

The old imitation pomps, the fuss and feathers, have departed, and the royal trademark--that is about all that one could miss, I suppose.

That imitation monarchy, was grotesque enough, in my time; if it had held on another thirty years it would have been a monarchy without subjects of the king's race.
We had a sunset of a very fine sort.

The vast plain of the sea was marked off in bands of sharply-contrasted colors: great stretches of dark blue, others of purple, others of polished bronze; the billowy mountains showed all sorts of dainty browns and greens, blues and purples and blacks, and the rounded velvety backs of certain of them made one want to stroke them, as one would the sleek back of a cat.

The long, sloping promontory projecting into the sea at the west turned dim and leaden and spectral, then became suffused with pink--dissolved itself in a pink dream, so to speak, it seemed so airy and unreal.