After Doubling Point Pinos, We Bore Up, Set Studding-Sails Alow And Aloft, And Were Walking Off At The Rate Of Eight Or Nine Knots, Promising To Traverse In Twenty-Four Hours The Distance Which We Were Nearly Three Weeks In Traversing On The Passage Up.

We passed Point Conception at a flying rate, the wind blowing so that it would have seemed half a gale to us, if we had been going the other way and close hauled.

As we drew near the islands off Santa Barbara, it died away a little but we came-to at our old anchoring-ground in less than thirty hours from the time of leaving Monterey.

Here everything was pretty much as we left it - the large bay without a vessel in it; the surf roaring and rolling in upon the beach; the white mission; the dark town and the high, treeless mountains. Here, too, we had our south-easter tacks aboard again, - slip-ropes, buoy-ropes, sails furled with reefs in them, and rope-yarns for gaskets. We lay here about a fortnight, employed in landing goods and taking off hides, occasionally, when the surf was not high; but there did not appear to be one-half the business doing here that there was in Monterey. In fact, so far as we were concerned, the town might almost as well have been in the middle of the Cordilleras. We lay at a distance of three miles from the beach, and the town was nearly a mile farther; so that we saw little or nothing of it.

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