CASTLE OF CALLAO. 179 chiefly occupied in preparations for the continuation of my voyage. After having sent a principal part of my luggage on board the Vincennes this afternoon, I took a farewell stroll on shore, and am confirmed, by a second inspection of the port, in the opinion that Callao is decidedly the most wretched place I ever beheld in a civilized country. The castle and fortresses, notwithstanding, constitute a noble pile, and are constructed on the most approved principles of modern engineering. As they have already formed, and probably will still form, a conspicuous locality in the history of Peru, I felt desirous of inspecting the works, and applied to the governor for the privilege of an entrance. This was most cheerfully granted, and an officer appointed to conduct Midshipman Henderson and myself around the ramparts and through the towers. The fortress is extensive, inclosing within its walls quite a town with a church and kind of state prison; this last a horrid place, with frightful dungeons filled with hundreds of unemployed convicts, huddled together in filth and rags. In the number I perceived two or three English and Irishmen, highwaymen, who have been sentenced to an imprisonment of fifteen years. After having been shown every thing worthy of particular notice within, with an acknowledgement of the politeness of the governor and officer who had attended us, we took leave, and recrossing the drawbridge, directed our way to the site and ruins of "old Callao", on the point adjoining, which was utterly overwhelmed by the great earthquake of 180 RUINS OF THE OLD TOWN. 1746; a calamity among the most fearful of its kind on record, by which the whole population perished in a moment, and the sea, like a mountain, rolled in upon the ruins, burying much of the shipping in port beneath the mighty surge, and bearing a frigate on its waters two miles and more into the country. The place and objects presented by it, accorded well with the tone of my feelings. Unaccustomed even to slight indisposition, the oppression I am at present suffering has affected, in a degree, the usual buoyancy of my spirits; and in view of the speedy breaking up of all my associations and attachments on board the Guerriere, I am not only sick in body, but under the influence also of the mal du pays. Weary of changes so exciting and so painful, my thoughts hurry with even more than ordinary warmth to the objects of affection bound to me for life; and as, in imagination, I scale the Andes and every intervening barrier between me and "the happy valley" around the waters of the Otsego, my only language is “Oh! that I had the wings of a dove; for then would I flee away," not to "the wilderness," but to all the blessings of my country and my home! But to return to the scene of the earthquake. The whole surface of the ground, for a wide extent, is broken and distorted by the tops of houses and churches whose foundations are far beneath; and sections of walls are here and there seen, in the inclined position in which they were caught by the gaping earth, as they fell under its agitations; while bones and ashes are widely strewed around. Not satisfied with the exhibition which these desolations of the ancient catastrophe still present, the passing generation has added a horrible deformity to the scene, by making these ruins the receptacle for the unburied bodies of the hundreds and thousands who have perished by famine and by sword, in the political convulsions of the last ten years. Within and around the neighbouring castle, heaps of skulls and broken skeletons are clustered on every side, while entire bodies, shrivelled and dried like a mummy, with the clothes in which they were shot or cast down still clinging to them, from the once showy uniforms of the officer and soldier to the rags and tatters of the beggar, with here and there a winding sheet, lie scattered abroad in sickening confusion and deformity! The scene was too horrible to witness, and almost too much so to describe; and we hastened from it to the beach, on the side of the point open to the full swell of the sea. Here the wildest and most fearful surf was rolling, as if again about to burst over its wonted barrier, and desolate the land. Beneath a gloomy and clouded sky, it too looked melancholy, and I returned on board ship, sick at heart at the many evidences I had met, both among the living and the dead, in the short walk of an hour, of the sin, and sorrow, and calamity, with which the world has been and still is filled! It was near sunset; and then came my last address and my last prayer with the crew, not calculated, in the immediate and necessary association, to dissipate the gloom, had not the only source of true 182 EVENING PRAYERS. consolation and the brightness of un unchanging world, where "all tears shall be wiped from our eyes," and there "shall be pleasures for evermore," been sweetly brought to sight by the hymn of Moore containing these beautiful lines: "Oh! who could bear life's stormy doom Did not thy wing of love Come brightly wafting thro' the gloom Then sorrow, touch'd by thee, grows bright, As darkness shows us worlds of light We never saw by day." WASHINGTON ISLANDS. LETTER XXIII. DEPARTURE FROM PERU. Incidents on leaving the Guerriere.-Parting of the Vincennes from the Squadron. U. S. Ship Vincennes, off Callao, THE Guerriere, dear H -, is no longer my home, and I am once more afloat in the midst of strangers. The morning was to me a sad one, spent chiefly, till the hour I expected to join this ship, in scribbling, by farewell notes to Commodore Thompson and Captain Smith, what I dared not trust to my lips when I should be called to give them the parting hand, and in passing from deck to deck to bid adieu, as I had opportunity, to the crew individually. The Vincennes was expected to weigh anchor at twelve o'clock, immediately after the firing of a national salute by each vessel of the squadron, in honour of the day; and early after breakfast, Captain Smith kindly apprised me of an intention of seeing me on board my new home in his own gig. This he did, but not till my heart had been deeply touched by a letter of much good will and affection from him. Coming, utterly unexpected as it did, from one I had learned to admire as a man and |