"'Ha! there's a splash!--a sailor in quarantine has stripped himself, and plunged into the water beneath his prison-door. Another and another follow him! How admirably they swim! the ease of the water-fowl, and the rapidity of the fish. See! one of them dives! How long he remains under water! Will he drown?--will he not be suffocated? not a bit of it; he rises to the surface, bearing in his hands some of the black, starry, thorny members of the crustaceous tribe. He has a knife in his right hand, which I did not observe before, and which he evidently took with him to dislodge the fish from their location in the rocky depths. Splash! and the strong swimmer is again twenty feet below the surface. Again, he rises--and again descends--and behold! he has accumulated a perfect breakfast of shell-fish! Meanwhile, the others breast the waves, diving, floating, playing, and rejoicing in all the muscular strength which the noble, healthful, and refreshing science calls into action. Well, a walk will do no harm--the verandah is sixty paces long, and forty or fifty turns will give one an appetite for breakfast. A. and B. have abundance of conversation for the promenade, and when we have exhausted the pleasures of memory, we can turn to the pleasures of hope, and debate the possibility of an abatement of the quarantine or, at any rate, discuss the respective advantages and pleasures of going to Syra, to Naples, or Marseilles. We are tired now, and it is time to dress. Breakfast is ready--can anything be more satisfactory, or anything more tempting and wholesome? There are coffee and tea, and three times as many rolls as we can eat! The eggs are as large as the finest production of the English barn-door hen, and boiled to the _exact_ point--half a minute less, and the albumen would not have coagulated; half a minute more, and they would have been as hard as a stone. And _there's_ a delicious dish of strawberries, brought only yesterday from the coast of Sicily, and plucked but an hour before their embarkation! And flowers too:--
'The captive soothers of a captive's hours.
"'Carlo, best of servitors, knows my _penchant_, and decks the table with the rose, the pink, the carnation, and the fragrant thyme.