tower is left solitary save the
fish-caves at its base. Its birdlime gleams in the golden rays like the
whitewash of a tall light-house, or the lofty sails of a cruiser. This
moment, doubtless, while we know it to be a dead desert rock other
voyagers are taking oaths it is a glad populous ship.

But ropes now, and let us ascend. Yet soft, this is not so easy.

* * * * *

SKETCH FOURTH.

A PISGAH VIEW FROM THE ROCK.

--"That done, he leads him to the highest mount,
From whence, far off he unto him did show:"--

If you seek to ascend Rock Rodondo, take the following prescription. Go
three voyages round the world as a main-royal-man of the tallest frigate
that floats; then serve a year or two apprenticeship to the guides who
conduct strangers up the Peak of Teneriffe; and as many more
respectively to a rope-dancer, an Indian juggler, and a chamois. This
done, come and be rewarded by the view from our tower. How we get there,
we alone know. If we sought to tell others, what the wiser were they?
Suffice it, that here at the summit you and I stand. Does any
balloonist, does the outlooking man in the moon, take a broader view of
space? Much thus, one fancies, looks the universe from Milton's
celestial battlements. A boundless watery Kentucky. Here Daniel Boone
would have dwelt content.

Never heed for the present yonder Burnt District of the Enchanted Isles.
Look edgeways, as it were, past them, to the south. You see nothing; but
permit me to point out the direction, if not the place, of certain
interesting objects in the vast sea, which, kissing this tower's base,
we behold unscrolling itself towards the Antarctic Pole.

We stand now ten miles from the Equator. Yonder, to the East, some six
hundred miles, lies the continent; this Rock being just about on the
parallel of Quito.

Observe another thing here. We are at one of three uninhabited clusters,
which, at pretty nearly uniform distances from the main, sentinel, at
long intervals from each other, the entire coast of South America. In a
peculiar manner, also, they terminate the South American character of
country. Of the unnumbered Polynesian chains to the westward, not one
partakes of the qualities of the Encantadas or Gallipagos, the isles of
St. Felix and St. Ambrose, the isles Juan-Fernandez and Massafuero. Of
the first, it needs not here to speak. The second lie a little above the
Southern Tropic; lofty, inhospitable, an