laying without a quiver, in their black
lifts and trusses, with their white leaves of sails crumpled and packed
in smooth bunts in the middle, and running away to nothing on either
hand at the tapering yard-arms.

Grand and imposing is the sight. And well may you wonder, ye land
lubbers, why all that mass of timber, sails, and cordage, with its
enormous weight, does not crush with the giant heels of the masts
through the bottom of the ship like unto an egg-shell, and tear the
stanch live-oak frame to splinters!

The commander of the frigate saw all this, and he beheld at the same
time the clusters of happy sailors, sauntering with light step and
pleasant faces up and down the waist and gangways; and he heard, too,
the scraping of a fiddle on the forecastle, the shuffling, dancing feet,
and the least notion of a jovial sea-song coming up from the gun-deck.
Yes, it must have been a glorious pride with which that gallant officer
gazed around him from the quarter-deck of the magnificent frigate.

Did he say to himself, "I am monarch of this floating kingdom; my will
is law; I say but the word, and those sails are spread and the ship
moves to wherever I command. My subjects, too, who watch my slightest
look and whisper, with that flag above, will pour broadside upon
broadside--ay, they have!--from those terrible guns upon whoever dares
to cross my track. Yes. They will fight for me so long as there is a
plank left in this huge ship to stand upon, and while there is a
rope-yarn left to hold the ensign--ay! even until my pennant, nailed to
the truck, sinks beneath the bloodstained waves?" Did the commander
think of all this? Perhaps he did.

And yet, in all the pride of rank and power, bravely won and maintained
in many a scene of strife and deadly conflict, with visions of honest
patriotism and ambition for the future, did his thoughts go back long
years ago into the shadowy past, and was his spirit in the silent
church-yard, where the magnolia was drooping over a grass-green grave?
The sweet mother and her baby boy--the girl who had so fondly loved him,
and the child who played about his knees--oh that they could have lived
to share the wreaths of victory which were hung around his brow; that
they could have lived to see the sword his country gave him, to twine
but for one little moment their loving arms around his neck! No, the
magnolia waves its white flowers over mother and boy, and they sleep on
in their heavenly and