I spent the whole of that day on deck, taking a very simple but an exquisite pleasure in just watching the ship sail. She did it so beautifully! There was a smashing breeze from the southeast, but the Virginia had everything set that she could stand up under,—a cloud of white canvas reaching up and up, apparently without end; she was heeled to her channels, and she _sailed_. It was a revelation to me; the speed, the discipline, which was like that on a war vessel, the continuous attention to little things like trimming in a sheet six inches, the haul on bowlines, until each sail drew without a tremor, pulling and hauling or slacking off a brace by inches, to make the angle exactly what the officer of the deck thought it should be. In the minute attention given to details it was like a continuous yacht race of to-day, but of ten or twelve thousand miles instead of thirty. The men were alive every minute of the time; they jumped at an order, and were satisfied and willing and proud of their ship. Anybody could see that, but who would not be? I had no doubt that there had been many and many a heartbreaking day of setting up and tarring down rigging, slushing masts, reeving ropes, and bending sails,—there must have been, on a ship driven as the Virginia was driven,—but I saw none of it that day. She was almost into port, and it was all done until the next time. The discipline was strict, but sailormen do not object to that. I think that, in their hearts, they like it. {290} They had a man of iron for master, but they had good quarters, good food, and good treatment. There would be no desertions at the next port. And the officers were all proud of the ship and put their best into her. As for Marshall, master, he loved the ship; loved her so well that he could not bear to see her not looking her best and doing her best. Until late that afternoon I hung over the weather rail, in the space to which passengers were limited, to use Captain Marshall’s words, in a condition of unalloyed bliss. I revelled in the breeze, in the sight of the marching, sunny sea, in the way the ship cut cleanly through the seas, keeping her bows wet with spray, in the crisp commands and the way the men responded to them, in the noises of a ship and the sound of the water, and in the silence. Now and then I lifted my eyes to the towering pyramid of canvas, and I could not help echoing the thought of the sailor quoted by Dana: “How quietly they do their work!” Captain Marshall was on deck nearly all day, pacing the deck by the weather rail, but I did not hear him give an order. He scarcely spoke. I think that he was in much the same condition as I. He watched the sea and the sky and the sails, and occasionally he smiled as if he was half ashamed of doing so, but could not help it. On one of these occasions I spoke to him impulsively. “Captain Marshall,” I said, “I must thank you for giving me this day. It has been as happy a day as I ever spent.”