highways with precision and comparative safety.

Our bottle moved along with the slow but majestic flow of one of those
mighty currents which are begotten among the hot isles of the Pacific,
where the corallines love to build their tiny dwellings and rear their
reefs and groves.

In process of time it left the warm regions of the sun, and entered
those stormy seas which hold perpetual war around Cape Horn. It passed
the straits where Magellan spread his adventurous sails in days of old,
and doubled the cape which Byron, Bougainville, and Cook had doubled
long before it.

Ah! well would it be for man if the bottle had never doubled anything
but that cape! And alas for man when his sight is doubled, and his
crimes and woes are doubled, and his life is halved instead of doubled,
by--"the bottle!"

Off Cape Horn our adventurous little craft met with the rough usage from
winds and waves that marked the passage of its predecessors. Stormy
petrels hovered over it and pecked its neck and cork. Albatrosses
stooped inquiringly and flapped their gigantic wings above it. South
Sea seals came up from Ocean's caves, and rubbed their furred sides
against it. Sea-lions poked it with their grizzly snouts; and penguins
sat bolt upright in rows on the sterile islands near the cape, and gazed
at it in wonder.

Onward it moved with the north-western drift, and sighted on its left,
(on its port bow, to speak nautically), the land of Patagonia, where the
early discoverers reported the men to be from six to ten feet high, and
the ladies six feet; the latter being addicted to staining their eyelids
black, and the former to painting a red circle round their left eyes.
These early discoverers failed, however, to tell us why the right eyes
of the men were neglected; so we are forced to the conclusion that they
were left thus untouched in order that they might wink facetiously with
the more freedom. Modern travellers, it would seem, contradict, (as
they usually do), many of the statements of ancient voyagers; and there
is now reason to believe that the Patagonians are not _much_ more
outrageous in any respect than ordinary savages elsewhere.

Not long after doubling the Cape, the bottle sailed slowly past the
Falkland Islands, whose rugged cliffs and sterile aspect seemed in
accordance with their character of penal settlement. Sea-lions,
penguins, and seals were more numerous than ever here, as if they were
the guardians of the pla