I said she ploughed deeply on getting beyond the Capes, because, with the considerate intelligence and humanity which preside over our naval affairs, sending boxes of guns to sea with national names, bringing about such sad losses as those of the Albany and the Porpoise, the Mississippi, designed by her constructor to draw eighteen feet of water, and to carry four hundred and fifty tons of coal, has her bunkers enlarged to the capacity of six hundred tons, additional lines of copper put upon her, and goes out drawing twenty-one feet, her guards but a short distance from the water. In this state we left the United States; her decks not yet cleared of the stores hastily put aboard for the different messes; the lengthened visages of sad people all around, thinking whether they had omitted anything in their notes of last adieu sent back by the Pilot; the mustering and stationing of a new crew at their division and fire quarters; the making everything ready for sea, all presented such a novel scene to one who was on a man-of-war underway for the first time, that he was too much engrossed in observing, to tell his “native land good-night,” turning to do which, he found that it had “faded,” not over the “waters blue,” but behind an expanse of dull slate-colored ocean, which the heavy striking of our deeply-immersed paddles was slowly and drowsily disturbing. There was none of the graceful undulatory motion, and bellying out of the great white canvass of the sailing-ship, which writers of much imagination and nautical turn of mind, delight so much to sing about. It was only the sturdy prose of a warlike old steamer belching from the jaws of her great funnel columns of thick black smoke, which separated at her mainmast, or rolled away in dense masses astern, perversely holding on her way to the port of her destination. The “loguey” motion of the ship, while it kept her decks wet from the swashing of a cross sea over her head rail, at least had the advantage to a landsman of enabling him to get on his “sea-legs” all the sooner. The scene at night on a man-of-war, is one full of interest to him who sees it for the first time. The decks, busily thronged during the day by the men in the performance of their duties, at an early hour of the night, with the exception of the watch, are apparently deserted; a number equal to the population of a small village, crowded close together, swing in their pendent beds in oblivious sleep, which the exertions of the day makes more profound, leaving nothing to disturb the quiet of the vessel, save the half-hour striking of the ship’s bell, and the quick responses of the different look-outs assuming their watchfulness, or the drumming of the wheels as they send the yesty water along the side.