At last the active days of preparation had passed, the stormy scenes of hope and despair for the graduates and those striving to stand at the head of their classes had gone, and a calm had fallen upon the Naval School. A restful lull was upon all. The graduates, those who had become full-fledged officers, had gone off on their short leave to their homes, to receive the congratulations of kindred and friends, to enjoy a rest before returning to report for stern duty afloat. They had stepped from light-hearted boyhood with all its joys, across the threshold of manhood with all its cares and ambitions. The first class and the third were busy preparing for the annual cruise, the remainder of the cadets were to stay behind and while the time away as best they could between duty and the freedom allowed them. Not as toy sailors were the cadets to go to sea, but in the capacity of ordinary seamen. Theirs was to be the duty of sailors before the mast, and they were to be drilled and disciplined in all their duties as such. If they were to command men they must learn the duties of those they were to order aloft, and, learning to obey to perfection, they could the better learn to thoroughly command. Of course, having stepped up a grade and entered upon a higher plane of study and work, Mark Merrill was to go on the sea cruise. Then, too, Scott Clemmons, Bemis Perry, and the others of his grade were to go with him, along with the men who had stepped into the places of those who had emerged from the embryo state of the cadet into the reality of the officer. An old vessel of war of full rig, without steam, and sail only as a propelling power, a ship with a record away back two generations, was the craft that was to become the sea school of the young sailors. They sailed in joyous spirits, all anxious to rove the deep blue sea. “With a wet sheet, And a flowing sea, And a wind that follows fast.” Mark Merrill was now like one in his true element. He had been literally born upon the ocean, and from his earliest remembrance had known how to row and sail a boat, to swim and face the ocean in sunshine and tempest. All his companions could see that Mark’s learning aboard ship had come from stern experience rather than teaching, and here, too, Scott Clemmons felt his inferiority, and it but added another cup of bitterness to the draught he was forced daily to swallow, for still did the “poor fisher lad” prove his right to be his master. The voyage had been mapped out for the cadet cruiser, and after a run down the beautiful Chesapeake she rounded the capes, and began to roll upon the blue waters of the Atlantic. Her first port was to be New York, and thither all letters had been ordered to meet her, while many of the relatives and friends of the young sea-rovers were there assembled to meet them and wish them a _bon voyage_ upon their cruise across the seas.