steerage, baggy hammock, and hard fare, where the occasional dessert to
a salt dinner had been dried apples, mixed with bread and flavored with
whiskey! There were no eleven-o'clock breakfasts for midshipmen in those
days, and canned meats, condensed milk, preserved fruits, and other
luxuries now common on shipboard, were almost unknown.

A few brief days at home and orders came to join the storeship Release,
which vessel after a three months' cruise in the Mediterranean returned
to New York to fill up with stores and provisions for the Paraguay
expedition. That expedition had for its object the chastisement of the
Dictator Lopez for certain dastardly acts committed against our flag on
the River Parana.

Owing to the paucity of officers, so many being absent on other foreign
service, Midshipman Perkins was appointed acting sailing-master, a very
responsible position for so young an officer, which, with the added
comforts of a stateroom and well-ordered table in the wardroom, was
almost royal in its contrast with the duty, the darksome steerage, and
hard fare on board the Cyane. It would be difficult to make a landsman
take in the scope of the change implied, but let him in imagination
start across the continent in an old-fashioned, cramped-up stage-coach,
full of passengers, with such coarse fare as could be picked up from day
to day, and return in a Pullman car with well-stocked larder and
restaurant attached, and he will get a glimmering as to the difference
between steerage and wardroom life on board a man-of-war.

The Release was somewhat of a tub, and what with light and contrary
winds and calms took sixty-two days to reach the rendezvous, Montevideo,
arriving there in January, 1858. She found the whole fleet at anchor
there, and officers and men soon forgot the weariness of the long