The noble ship with her floating battery of heavy guns, her hundreds of seamen, smart and brave, her powder, shot, and shell for destroying an enemy, and her tons of provender to supply her crew; with her anxious captain and aspiring lieutenants, mates, middys, warrant officers, and her pipeclayed marines are on board. The long pennon whips the winds; the hurry, bustle, and noise of preparation has subsided into the quietude of everything in its place; when the word passes that she is “Ready for Sea.” Next morning the newspapers find just a line and a half in their naval corner for the announcement,—“Her Majesty’s ship Unutterable, 120 guns, went out of harbour yesterday. After she has been swung, and had her compasses adjusted, she will sail for the Pacific.” “_Swing_ a hundred and twenty gun ship?” says the good citizen interrogatively to himself, as he devours his coffee and his newspaper at breakfast. He pays his taxes and is proud of Britannia and the British navy, but his admiration of the nautical does not help him to a solution. “After she has been swung!” he repeats, and then more immediate affairs draw off his attention, and he leaves the Unutterable to undergo the mysterious. He turns to the debates. Naval officers are of course more wise on the point, and some of them have more knowledge of the operation than liking for it. It’s apt to spoil the paint now and then, and gives trouble, and upsets some of their arrangements. Many, it must be confessed, have more experience than science in their composition, and when they let out their true feeling, indulge, perhaps, in a half growl, in which the words “new-fangled” and “deal of trouble” might be heard. But the operation goes on nevertheless, and little doubt but the toil is forgotten and the growl repented when—far, far at sea, a murky sky shuts out the sun and the stars, and forbids heaven to tell the navigator where he is—with a waste of waters, hundreds, perhaps thousands of miles around him, he has nought but his figures and his little trembling needles of magnetised iron to guide him on his way; to direct him wide of the sunken rock and the sandy shoal as he nears the wished-for coast.