DEPOSITORY OF BONES. 319 features, and lifeless, though open eyes, there still lingered an expression of the pain, the sorrow, and the melancholy of death! The silk drapery, gold lace, gay flowers, and tinselled ornaments with which it was loaded, seemed sadly inconsistent and ill placed, beside the evidence presented by it of the frailty of life, and of the agonies of dissolution. On making an inquiry, as to the time and manner of the interment, a gateway at one side of the chapel was pointed out, and we invited to view the burial place of infants. It is a small building of a circular form, over the portal of which was the inscription, "angelio," reviving again, in a remembrance of the declaration of "such is the kingdom of heaven," the associations of a pleasing kind which we had felt before the sight of the corpse-but only to have them dissipated a second time by that which was much more horrible and disgusting; for, on following our conductor along a kind of terrace round this mausoleum, the word "Osario," in large letters on the wall, immediately behind it, met our eyes; and, on looking into an area below, to which there was a descent on either side by a flight of stone steps, we beheld a most shocking mass of mouldering bones and flesh; of ghastly skulls, with mildewed locks and grisley hair still attached to them; while hands and feet, kept in form by the adhesion of dried and discolored tendons, were scattered among the bones of various other parts of the body. It is thus, after having lain in the niches the appointed time, the bodies are withdrawn from their repose, cast out from their coffins, and left, an indiscriminate mass of corruption, to enrich, by the decay of time, the bosom of their mother earth! This sight destroyed all the interest of our first impressions; and we hurried from it, past the little corpse still lying unregarded in the midst of the avenue, to our carriages. It is but a mile from the Campo Santo, or Pantheon, to the Calzada, which we reached in a few minutes ; and were at once in the midst of a scene in the widest contrast to that we had left. All the rank and fashion of the city were rolling along in various equipages, in all the gayety of evening dress, in a tropical climate; while two thousand troops were performing the evolutions of the usual drill, to the rich and soul-stirring strains of full military bands, stationed at different points of the parade. We took our place in the line of carriages, coursing with them the beautiful drive, till the military display was over, and then returned to the city in the customary slow procession of the troops and bands. THE CAPE OF GOOD HOPE, AND ISLAND OF ST. HELENA. LETTER I. DESCRIPTION OF CAPE TOWN. U. S. Ship Vincennes, Table Bay, AFTER a voyage of fifty-six days from Manilla, including two at anchor in the Straits of Sunda, we yesterday doubled the Cape of Good Hope, and before night ran thirty miles north of it to the bay, in which we now are, without however securing an entrance to it before nightfall. I was roused this morning at four o'clock by the dropping our anchors abreast of Cape Town, and went early afterwards on deck. We were within less than a mile of the town, lying closely along the water's edge, directly beneath the Table Mountain, which rises seemingly from its very outskirts like a perpendicular wall of granite, three thousand five hundred feet high. It is perfectly level on the top for a stretch of some miles, and in its face towards the water presents much the aspect, with the exception of the tuft |