How calm it was until five o’clock yesterday afternoon! The sea was as if oiled and of a rich blue, fascinating to contemplate and deeper in color than usual. No stream that ever cascaded down a mountain-side could approach in transparency the sea-water as found in the remote solitudes of the ocean. We had a strange sunset, too, the horizon being apparently at an immense distance, with whole chains of ragged, golden-tipped clouds, like jagged mountain rocks, seemingly a hundred miles away. We had a fine breeze all day from east-northeast, which, it is true, jammed us on the wind, but it was fresh enough to blow us along at seven knots. Latitude at noon, 36° 5′ north; longitude, 50° 36′ west. +May 19+ This was perhaps the finest day which we have had yet. It broke with the heavens obscured; but during the forenoon the clouds melted under the influence of the sun and an afternoon of dazzling brilliancy followed. A fresh breeze whistled out of the east-northeast, giving us as much as we could show the sky-sails to; and the ocean was covered with foam-topped waves like immense snow flakes, the crests of which often came tumbling in glee over the weather side. Yesterday afternoon at two o’clock we rose the upper canvas of a bark on the port bow, bound in the same direction as ourselves; at 4.30 she was abeam, and at seven in the evening, her trucks had vanished below the horizon astern! In truth this ship is a flyer on a wind, for, in order to pass the other vessel in so short a time, we must have sailed almost, if not quite, two miles to her one. Again, this morning at daylight, we made out the sails of a ship hull down to leeward; she was then abeam, steering about southeast, but during the afternoon we ran her out of sight, too. For the past twenty-four hours we have certainly done splendidly, logging one hundred and ninety-eight miles, hauled as close to the wind as possible. Captain Scruggs even went so far as to say that he thought that there were only two other American ships afloat that could have made more than two hundred miles to-day by the wind,--the “Henry B. Hyde” and the “A. G. Ropes.” Later I asked the skipper which he considered was the finest all-round wooden ship under the flag to-day; his answer instantly was, “the ’Hyde’ by all odds; and not only that, but she’s one of the finest ships that ever came out of a Maine ship-yard.” She was built about ten years ago in Bath, by John McDonald, a Nova Scotian and a pupil of the famous Donald Mackay of Boston, who turned out so many celebrated clippers thirty or forty years ago. The “Hyde” is a large ship, registering twenty-five hundred tons; but in spite of her size she is a three-master, being, I believe, the second largest ship of this rig at the present time, the British ship “Ditton” heading the roll of three-masters with a net tonnage of about twenty-eight hundred. Almost all sailing vessels of over two thousand tons register are now built with four masts.