3846 ISLES OF SUMMER. 
The early Sabbath morn found a large number of our fellow 
voyagers intently scanning the eastern horizon from the good 
ship’s upper deck. The usual speculations, inseparable from 
such an occasion, as to the time when we would reach our haven 
of rest, afforded fit material for the interchange of thought and 
a comparison of views. It was asubject in which all were deeply 
interested, but the weather had been so fine, and the voyage so 
pleasant, that we felt that in landing we should only exchange 
one form of happiness for another. Our ship was new, scrupu- 
lously neat and clean, staunch and steady, admirably officered 
and manned, and all its appointments were decidedly first-class, 
so that a sentiment akin to that which one entertains for a beau- 
tiful, spirited and intelligent horse, that has carried him safely 
and ministered to his happiness, sprang up and took firm root 
in the minds of the fortunate passengers in reference to the 
Steam Screw Ship Western Texas. The Texas we felt was our 
ship, and to it we seemed to owe a kind of fealty and true alle- 
giance. 
As the morning wore away, our passenger captain, with his 
trained, long-sighted sea-eyes, detected a faint trace of curling 
smoke upon the background of delicate low clouds rising from 
the eastern horizon. This, he assured us, was smoke from a fire 
on the island of New Providence. Soon after, his telescopic eyes 
discerned in a white, perpendicular line, about as big around as 
a spider’s thread, the coralline lighthouse at the eastern end of 
Hog Island, at the entrance of Nassau harbor. Very soon the 
less visually gifted were able to verify assertions which, to their 
more narrow ‘vision, seemed to be prophetic—and their faith was 
goon supplemented by actual knowledge. Thus is it often with 
hidden truths and mysteries profound! 
Between 9 and 10 o’clock in the forenoon we crossed the bar, 
and once more revelled in the picturesque beauty of the winding 
