t for some time. Then, with all her sails,
light and heavy, and studding-sails on each side alow and aloft,
she is the most glorious moving object in the world. Such a
sight very few, even some who have been at sea a good deal, have
ever beheld; for from the deck of your own vessel you can not
see her as you would a separate object.

"One night, while we were in the tropics, I went out to the end
of the flying jib-boom upon some duty; and, having finished it,
turned around and lay over the boom for a long time, admiring
the beauty of the sight before me. Being so far out from the
deck, I could look at the ship as at a separate vessel; and
there rose up from the water, supported only by the small black
hull, a pyramid of canvas spreading far out beyond the hull and
towering up almost, as it seemed in the indistinct night, into
the clouds. The sea was as still as an inland lake; the light
trade-wind was gently and steadily breathing from astern; the
dark-blue sky was studded with the tropical stars; there was no
sound but the rippling of the water under the stem; and the
sails were spread out wide and high--the two lower
studding-sails stretching on either side far beyond the deck;
the topmost studding-sails like wings to the topsails; the
topgallant studding-sails spreading fearlessly out above them;
still higher the two royal studding-sails, looking like two
kites flying from the same string; and highest of all the little
sky-sail, the apex of the pyramid, seeming actually to touch the
stars and to be out of reach of human hand. So quiet, too, was
the sea, and so steady the breeze, that if these sails had been
sculptured marble they could not have been more motionless--not
a ripple on the surface of the canvas; not even a quivering of
the extreme edges of the sail, so perfectly were they distended
by the breeze. I was so lost in the sight that I forgot the
presence of the man who came out with me, until he said (for he,
too, rough old man-of-war's man that he was, had been gazing at
the show), half to himself, still looking at the marble sails:
'How quietly they do their work!'"

The building of packet ships began in 1814, when some semblance of peace
and order appeared upon the ocean, and continued until almost the time of
the Civil War, when steamships had already begun to cut away