Twenty years later, in the Pacific, I commanded one of these old war-horses, not yet turned out to grass or slaughter, ship-rigged to royals, and slow-steamed. One day the French admiral came on board to return my official visit. As he left, he paused for a moment abreast one of our big, and very old, pivot guns. "Capitaine," he said, "les vieux canons!" Two or three days later came his chief of staff on some errand or other. That discharged, when I was accompanying him to his boat at the gangway, he stopped in the same spot as the admiral. His gaze was meditative, reminiscent, perhaps even sentimental. "Ou sont les neiges d'antan?" Whatever their present merits as fighting-machines, he saw before him an historical memento, sweeping gently, doubtless, the chords of youthful memories. "Oui, oui!" he said at last; "l'ancien systeme. Nous l'avons eu." It was a summary of American naval policy during the twenty years following 1865; we "hail" things which other nations "had had," until Secretary Chandler started the movement of renovation by the first of all necessary steps, the official exposure of the sham to which we had allowed ourselves to be committed. There is an expression, "quaker guns," applied to blackened cylinders of wood, intended to simulate cannon, and mounted upon ramparts or a ship's broadside to impose upon an enemy as to the force before him. We made four such for the _Macedonian_, to deceive any merchant-men we spoke as to our battery, in case she should report us to an _Alabama_; and, being carried near the bows, much trouble they gave us, being usually knocked overboard when we tacked ship, or set a lower studding-sail. Well, by 1885 the United States had a "quaker" navy; the result being that, not the enemy, but our own people were deceived. Like poor Steece's passengers on board the _Ariel_, we were blissfully sheltering behind pine boards.