Landlubbers, may be, have no right to express an opinion, but the skilful steering of the great ship up the river to Saigon struck us as about the finest piece of seamanship we had ever seen; like a product of French cookery, neat, dainty, and well trimmed off.
As to Saigon itself, the impression left is one of blank failure. Our French neighbours excel us in many things, but as colonists they must be pronounced unouecessful. A gloomy dead-alive place Saigon seemed; its people discouraged, and only staying on till the first possible moment to leave. The French seem to be too deeply attached to la belle France ever to be happy.away from it. Shanghai is to have a tramway, apparently: the quicker the better—at least so we think. What an addition to our Settlement will a neat well-conducted electric tram-car be! We shall certainly never perpetrate such an unsightly noisy shrieking thing as the locomotive running in Saigon.
'And now the bell rings for visitors to go ashore, and we look for a great exodus of the vast crowd of soldiers and others who have come on board.' And just here we rake our mistake; for all these people are going ashore, but not here—at Marseilles.
fond farewell to roominess and attendance. Our saloon is so doubly crowded that the passengers have to be served in detachments, and the rest on deck; our cabin 14.2 by 8 by 6.8, or thereabouts, contains two Englishmen and ten French soldiers; and many sleep on deck, for there is no room at all downstairs.
We could not but feel deeply sorry for many, of these men, serving their compulsory three years at six cents a day, often ailing and mostly homesick. Such' kindhearted genial fellows they mostly seemed, bearing misfortunes laughingly, and coming up smilingly. during the heaviest monsoon, A'thousand times we admixed their happy genial way of taking contretemps which would have evoked a hearty grumble from some of us more animal-like Britons. One of our. chief reasons for going home by French mail was to lessen our ignorance of the French and their language: and the over ready courtesy of at any rate the humbler passengers gave us as much help was possible to avail ourselves of in this direction, Many a kind enquiry and many a service did they perform for the By fever and stress of weather. resent writer, considerably hors de combat
We had bought a great sofa arrangement of rattan, capable of seating eight—ten indeed, including the head-rest—such a sized affair it was that we wondered often whether the Captain would not have it thrown overboard, which possibly would have happened had it not been such Republican institution, providing a seat for many who had none otherwise. When this thing was brought on board we saw not a few, including officers, laughing at its size; we had the smile however, later on, when several Frenchmen desirous to improve their English and the Present writer desirous to improve his French, accompanied by dictionariesand vocabularies galore, turned the said rattan couch into merry educational institution. (Seats are not provided for third-class French mail people.)
We need not enter into many details of the discomforts of the way suffice it to warn our most economical friends against trying third-class French, unless there is a certainty that no crowd of soldiers will be taken on at Saigon, and it seems impossible to tell till after reaching that port. It was impossible for us at any rate to sleep in the awful cabin, with closed port-hole, and permeated through and through by the smell of man.' A recent writer suggests as the only solution to the want of amity that often exists between the French and English, a joint government of both countries. This may. be. #0; but such partnership, hardly seems to reach to circumstances we have mentioned. many forms of hardship we do not intend ever again to economise thus. We simpl linad to change into the second class, which seemed to us all that could be desired.
Te was pleasant at Singapore to get such accounts of the prospect of rapid opening of neighbouring native States, and the bright future there seems for Euro; interests in these parts. We landed a Shanghai man, who secured at any rate a cheering start up country next day. An editor of one of the Singapore papers assured us of the commercial soundness of many of these pleasant anticipations.
And now we steam pleasantly through the Malacca Straits, until we reach the Cape of Acheen, when all at once such a sea struck us as made many of us almost decide negatively the question "Is life worth living?" The laureate-ship being at that time vacant, we commenced an ode, but got little farther than The Cape of Acheen The Cape of Acheen It's the very worst Cape that ever was seen and so on for a while; but the fact was that we were no sooner out of the Straits than we were in such straits as effectually dismissed the postic muse, and so Austin has won, Also calm reflection showed that it was not the Cape but an absence of cape which we had to mourn, Thence to Colombo was bad, decidedly. The horrid unpleasantness of parts of this voyage hangs like a nightmare over us.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.