Weak as I was after my long confinement below, dazzled and confused too by the splendour of the morning, and the novelty and wonder of that windy scene of our bowing ship, clothed in canvas, gleaming like silk to the trucks, I could not but pause with a start of admiration when my sight went to that steamer. Captain Burke, seeing me as I leaned on his wife's arm, crossed the deck, and after some commonplaces of genial greeting told me that yonder vessel was a French man-of-war. She was round sterned with portholes for guns there, and two white lines full of gun-ports ran the length of her tall, shapely sides. She was ship-rigged, and lifted a lustrous fabric of square canvas and delicate cordage to the soft blue skies, a wide space of whose field the gilded balls of her trucks traced as she rolled heavily but with majesty, crushing the water at her bows to the impulse of her sails and propeller into a heap of splendid whiteness, like to the foam at the foot of some giant cataract. She was the noblest sea-piece I had ever beheld: the tricolour was at her gaff-end, a blue vein of smoke, filtering from a short black funnel, scarcely tarnished the azure over the horizon betwixt her fore and main masts; a great gilt eagle was perched with outstretched wings under her bowsprit, and seemed to be poised for a soaring flight as though affrighted by the roar of spume beneath; her decks were a blaze of light and colour when she rolled them towards us, with the sparkle of uniforms, the flash of sun-stars in bright metal, and gleams breaking from I know not whence, like sudden flames from artillery. 'I think I see her in charge of an English lieutenant,' said Captain Burke, 'making a straight course for Portsmouth. They have built good ships for us and will build again.' He placed chairs, and Mrs. Burke and I seated ourselves. I could now look about me with enjoyment of what I beheld. The sun shone with some warmth, and the wind blowing freely out of the west was of an April mildness. The whole life of the universe seemed to be in that ocean morning, with our ship in the middle of it bowing as she drove over the long blue knolls. The hour was half-past eleven. Smoke was feathering down upon the water over the lee side out of the chimney of the galley, through whose door as I looked I saw a sailor emerge holding a steaming tub, with which he staggered in the direction of a little square hole on the forecastle. Immediately after a second sailor rolled out similarly burthened. 'The men are going to dinner,' said Mrs. Burke. 'What do you give them to eat?' I asked the captain. 'To-day,' said he, 'they'll dine on beef and pudding.' 'It sounds a good dinner,' said Mrs. Burke. 'But all the while I'm at sea, I'm wondering how sailors contrive to get through their work on the food they get.' 'Go and put those notions into their shaggy heads forwards and there'll be a mutiny,' said the captain.