We were now entering on the longest run we anticipated making during the cruise. On the second morning out at an early hour we made Palma, one of the westernmost of the Canary islands. When the sun came up from behind it, defining its sharp peaks and irradiating the whole outline of the island, I had the happy consciousness that it fully compensated me for the rupture of my matinal slumbers, necessary to get a glimpse of it. The celebrated peak of Teneriffe was wrapped in cloud when we passed, and I did not see it; though others with “optics sharp,” at one time, said they discerned it in the extreme distance. We subsequently passed in sight of the Cape de Verde islands. During the day we ran into what is termed the incipient northeast trades, and as our coal was not deemed sufficient for the run before us, the engines were stopped, twenty tons of water blown from the boilers, fires extinguished, sufficient number of the paddles removed from the wheels, which were lashed, the large smoke stack lowered on the hurricane deck, and the ship put under sail. Many of us thought if the Japanese could only get a sight of the funnel as it lay in its chocks like another huge “peace-maker” when we reached their country, they would prove quite accessible. The spars of the Mississippi being tall, she spread a great deal of canvass, but the wind continuing quite light we made but little progress for several days. A whale saluted us by tapping his head against our port guard. On the 18th we tacked ship, and on the 21st we got the trade-winds proper, and under studding-sails ran quite well. Life on the ocean, monotonous, nearly, at all times, was rendered more so to us, by the transition from a steamer to a sailing ship. To study on shipboard, or even to read with profit, as I had heard before, is next to impossible, unless it may be with an old sea-dog to whom for some forty years the “ocean has been a dwelling-place.” Try it, and you will find your eyes wandering from the type, and your thoughts bolting from the subject, like a refractory quarter-horse over a track railing. The weekly routine of the ship was comprised in going to quarters, morning and evening, for inspection; and once a week the whole ship’s company are beat to general quarters, when the magazines are open, the powder-boys busy in passing and repassing cartridge-boxes, the guns are cast loose and worked by their crews, boarders are called away, pikemen are posted to repel boarders, marines are stationed near them, &c.; the master gives his orders for sail-trimmers to put stoppers on such portions of the rigging, as an active imagination suggests must have been shot away, and all the evolutions of an actual engagement at sea are gone through; together with exercise at fire-quarters, when an alarm with the ship’s bell is rung, at which sentinels are placed at the falls of each boat, so that in an actual emergency there could be none of the inhuman desertion and infamous flight which marked