The _Macedonian_, for a sailing-vessel, had a quite rapid run across from Newport to Plymouth, eighteen days from anchor to anchor, though I believe one of our frigates, after the war, made it in twelve. This was the only occasion, during my fairly numerous crossings, that. I have ever seen icebergs under a brilliant sky. Usually the scoundrels come skulking along masked by a fog, as though ashamed of themselves, as they ought to be. They are among the most obnoxious of people who do not know their place. This time we passed several, quite large, having a light breeze and perfectly clear horizon. After that it again set in thick, with the usual anxiety which ice, unseen but surely near, cannot but cause. Finally we took a very heavy gale of wind, which settled to southwest, hauling gradually to northwest and sending us rejoicing on our way a thousand miles in four days, much of this time under close-reefed topsails. I am not heedless of the great danger of merely prosing along in the telling of the days of youth, so I will shut off my experience of the _Macedonian_ with an incident which amused me greatly at the time, and still seems to have a moral that one needs not to point. While lying at Spithead, a number of the midshipmen were sent ashore to visit the dock yard,--professional improvement. When they returned, the lieutenants in charge were full of the block-making processes. The ingenuity of the machinery, the variety and beauty of the blocks, the many excellences, had the changes rung upon them, meal after meal, till I could hear the whir of the wheels in my head and see the chips fly. Meantime, our captain went to London, having completed his official visiting, and an English captain came on board to return a call. Declining my invitation to enter the cabin, he walked up and down the quarter-deck with me, discussing many things; under his arm his sword. Suddenly he stopped short, and pointing with it to a big iron-strapped leading-block, he said, "Now that is what I call a sensible block; I wonder why it is we cannot get blocks like that in our ships." I was not prepared with a reason for their defects, then or since; but my unreadiness has not marred my enjoyment of these divergent points of view. Perhaps the captain was a professional malcontent; for, looking at a Parrott rifled hundred-pounder gun which we carried on the quarter-deck, he said, interrogatively, "Not breech-loading?" "No," I answered, "breech-loading is not in favor with us at present." "And very right you are," he rejoined. I think they then (1863) still had the Armstrong breech-loading system. This incident may deserve a place in the palaeontology of gun-making. There are now, I presume, no muzzle-loaders left; unless in museums, as specimens.