On Saturday evening the party prepared to go on board the Ready; and as I was to pass Sunday with them, it was deemed prudent to send my boat to a safe anchorage-ground on the east side of Horse Shoe Bay, where, moored among some islands, my floating home would be protected from boisterous seas and covetous fishermen.

Climbing the sides of the Ready, I was filled with admiration for the beautiful vessel, the last one built especially for the Coast Survey service.  The entire craft, with its clean decks and well-arranged interior, was a model of order and skilful arrangement.  The home-like cabin, with its books and various souvenirs of the officers, was in strange contrast with the close quarters of my own little boat.  The day was most pleasantly passed; and as the morrow threatened to be windy, Mr. Perkins kindly offered to put me on board the sneak-box before sunset.  The gig was manned by a stalwart crew of sailors, and the chief of the party took the tiller ropes in his hands as we dashed away through the waves towards Horse Shoe Bay.

At four in the afternoon we entered the sheltered waters of a miniature archipelago close to the coast, and I beheld with a degree of affection and satisfaction, experienced only by a boat man, my own little craft floating safely at her moorings.  The officers gave me a sailor’s hearty farewell, the boat’s crew bent to their oars and were soon far in the offing, growing each moment more indistinct while I gazed, until a white speck, like a gull resting upon the sea, was the only visible sign left me of Mr. Perkins and his party.

My voyage of twenty-six hundred miles was nearly ended.  The beautiful Suwanee River, from which I had emerged in my paper canoe one year before, (when I had terminated a voyage of twenty-five hundred miles begun in the high latitude of Canada,) was only a few miles to the eastward.  Upon reaching its debouchure on the Gulf coast, the termini of the two voyages would be united.  It would be only a few hours’ pull from the mouth of the Suwanee to the port of Cedar Keys, whose railroad facilities offered to the boat and her captain quick transportation across the peninsula of Florida to Fernandina, on the Atlantic coast, where kind friends had prepared for my arrival.

While I gazed upon the smooth sea, a longing to pass the night on the dark waters of the river of song took possession of me, and mechanically weighing anchor, I took up my oars and pulled along the coast to my goal.  Before sunset, the old landmark of the mouth of the Suwanee(the iron boiler of a wrecked blockade-runner) appeared above the shoal water, and I began to search for the little hammock, called Bradford’s Island, where one year before I had spent my last night on the Gulf of Mexico with the “Maria Theresa,” my little paper canoe.  Soon it rose like a green spot in the desert, the well-remembered grove coming into view, with the half-dead oak’s scraggy branches peering out of the feathery tops of the palmettos.