Kitabı oku: «Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 11, No. 23, February, 1873», sayfa 9
"The feminine eye is caught by display," said her son sententiously.
They chatted as they drove rapidly through the forest to the old house, entered the front gate and rolled up the broad avenue.
"I had no idea the place looked so well," remarked Danby, en connaisseur, as they approached. "I always entered by the back way;" and he gave his moustache a final twirl.
After a loud knock from a vigorous hand the door was opened by a small servant, much resembling Nellie some four years before. Danby was going to speak to her, but recalling the time that had elapsed, he knew it could not be she. All within was altered. Three rooms en suite, the last of which was the library, had been carefully refurnished. He looked about him. Could this be the place in which he had passed so many days? But he forgot all in the figure that advanced to receive them. With a pretty grace she gave her hand to his mother and welcomed "Mr. Overbeck." How she talked—talked like a babbling brook! It was now his turn to open big eyes and be silent. He tried to recall the girl he had left. Vain endeavor! This bright creature, grave and gay, silent but ready, respectful yet confident, how could he follow her? The visit came to an end, but was repeated again and again by Danby, and each time with new astonishment, new delight. She had the coquetry of a dozen women, yet her eyes looked so true. She was a perfect elf for pranks and jokes, yet demure as a nun. When he tried to awe her with his learning, she was saucy; if he was serious, she was gay; if he wished to teach, she rebelled. She was self-willed as a changeling, refractory yet gentle, seditious but just,—only waiting to strike her colors and proclaim him conqueror; but this he did not know, for she kept well hid in her heart what "woman's fear" she had. She was all her favorite heroines in turn, with herself added to the galaxy.
One day he penetrated into the library, notwithstanding some very serious efforts on her part to prevent him: by this time he would occasionally assert himself. The furniture there was not much altered. A few worn things had been replaced, but the room looked so much the same that the scene of that first reading-lesson came vividly to his mind. He turned to the side where the desk had stood. It was still there, with the two chairs before it, and on it was the book. She would not for the world have had it moved, but it was, as it were, glorified. Mr. Archer had wished "these old things cleared away," but Nellie had besought him so earnestly that he allowed them to stay, stipulating, however, that they should be upholstered anew. To this she assented, saying, "Send me the best of everything and I will cover them—the very best, mind;" and her father, willing to please her, did as she desired.
So the old desk became smart in brocade and gold-lace, the book received a cushion all bullion and embroidery, and the chairs emulated the splendor. It required a poet or a girl in love to clothe a fancy so beautifully, and Nellie was both. It was her shrine: why should she not adorn it?
I cannot follow the process of thought in Danby's mind as he looked at this and at Nellie—Nellie blushing with the sudden guiltiness that even the discovery of a harmless action will bring when we wish to conceal it. Sometimes a moment reveals much.
"Nellie"—it was the first time he had called her so since his return—"I must give you a reading-lesson: come, sit here."
Mechanically she obeyed him, all the rebel fading away: she looked like the Nellie of other days. She felt she had laid bare her soul, but in proportion as her confusion overcame her did he become decided. It is the slaves that make tyrants, it is said.
Under the impulse of his hand the book opened at the well-worn page.
"Read!"
For a little while she sat with downcast eyes. Well she knew the passage to which he was pointing: "Love! But it cannot be sounded: my affection hath an unknown bottom, like the bay of Portugal."
The sentence seemed to dance and grow till it covered the page—grow till in her sight it assumed the size of a placard, and then it took life and became her accuser—told in big letters the story of her devotion to the mocking boy beside her.
"There is good advice on the preceding page," he whispered smiling. "Orlando says he would kiss before he spoke: may I?"
She started up and looked at his triumphant face a moment, her mouth quivering, her eyes full of tears. "How can you—" she began.
But before she could finish he was by her side: "Because I love you—love you, all that the book says, and a thousand times more. Because if you love me we will live our own romance, and I doubt if we cannot make our old woods as romantic as the forest of Arden. Will you not say," he asked tenderly, "that there will be at least one pair of true lovers there?"
I could not hear Nellie's answer: her head was so near his—on his shoulder, in fact—that she whispered it in his ear. But a moment after, pushing him from her with the old mischief sparkling from her eyes, she said, "'Til frown and be perverse, and say thee nay, so thou wilt woo,'" and looked a saucy challenge in his face.
"Naughty sprite!" he exclaimed, catching her in his arms and shutting her mouth with kisses.
It was not long after, perhaps a year, that a happy bride and groom might have been seen walking up the hemlock avenue arm in arm.
"Do you remember," she asked, smiling thoughtfully—"do you remember the time I begged you to come home with me and be my pet?"
The young husband leaned down and said something the narrator did not catch, but from the expression of his face it must have been very spoony: with a bride such as that charming Nellie, how could he help it?
Yes, she had brought him home. Mr. Archer had given the house with its broad acres as a dowry to his daughter, and Nellie had desired that the honeymoon should be spent in her "forest of Arden."
ITA ANIOL PROKOP.
JACK, THE REGULAR
In the Bergen winter night, when the hickory fire is roaring,
Flickering streams of ruddy light on the folk before it pouring—
When the apples pass around, and the cider follows after,
And the well-worn jest is crowned by the hearers' hearty laughter—
When the cat is purring there, and the dog beside her dozing,
And within his easy-chair sits the grandsire old, reposing,—
Then they tell the story true to the children, hushed and eager,
How the two Van Valens slew, on a time, the Tory leaguer,
Jack, the Regular.
Near a hundred years ago, when the maddest of the Georges
Sent his troops to scatter woe on our hills and in our gorges,
Less we hated, less we feared, those he sent here to invade us
Than the neighbors with us reared who opposed us or betrayed us;
And amid those loyal knaves who rejoiced in our disasters,
As became the willing slaves of the worst of royal masters,
Stood John Berry, and he said that a regular commission
Set him at his comrades' head; so we called him, in derision,
"Jack, the Regular."
When he heard it—"Let them fling! Let the traitors make them merry
With the fact my gracious king deigns to make me Captain Berry.
I will scourge them for the sneer, for the venom that they carry;
I will shake their hearts with fear as the land around I harry:
They shall find the midnight raid waking them from fitful slumbers;
They shall find the ball and blade daily thinning out their numbers:
Barn in ashes, cattle slain, hearth on which there glows no ember,
Neatless plough and horseless wain; thus the rebels shall remember
Jack, the Regular!"
Well he kept his promise then with a fierce, relentless daring,
Fire to rooftrees, death to men, through the Bergen valleys bearing:
In the midnight deep and dark came his vengeance darker, deeper—
At the watch-dog's sudden bark woke in terror every sleeper;
Till at length the farmers brown, wasting time no more on tillage,
Swore those ruffians of the Crown, fiends of murder, fire and pillage,
Should be chased by every path to the dens where they had banded,
And no prayers should soften wrath when they caught the bloody-handed
Jack, the Regular.
One by one they slew his men: still the chief their chase evaded.
He had vanished from their ken, by the Fiend or Fortune aided—
Either fled to Powles Hoek, where the Briton yet commanded,
Or his stamping-ground forsook, waiting till the hunt disbanded;
So they checked pursuit at length, and returned to toil securely:
It was useless wasting strength on a purpose baffled surely.
But the two Van Valens swore, in a patriotic rapture,
_They_ would never give it o'er till they'd either kill or capture
Jack, the Regular.
Long they hunted through the wood, long they slept upon the hillside;
In the forest sought their food, drank when thirsty at the rill-side;
No exposure counted hard—theirs was hunting border-fashion:
They grew bearded like the pard, and their chase became a passion:
Even friends esteemed them mad, said their minds were out of balance,
Mourned the cruel fate and sad fallen on the poor Van Valens;
But they answered to it all, "Only wait our loud view-holloa
When the prey shall to us fall, for to death we mean to follow
Jack, the Regular."
Hunted they from Tenavlieon to where the Hudson presses
To the base of traprocks high; through Moonachie's damp recesses;
Down as far as Bergen Hill; by the Ramapo and Drochy,
Overproek and Pellum Kill—meadows flat and hilltops rocky—
Till at last the brothers stood where the road from New Barbadoes,
At the English Neighborhood, slants toward the Palisadoes;
Still to find the prey they sought left no sign for hunter eager:
Followed steady, not yet caught, was the skulking, fox-like leaguer
Jack, the Regular.
Who are they that yonder creep by those bleak rocks in the distance,
Like the figures born in sleep, called by slumber to existence?—
Tories doubtless from below, from the Hoek, sent out for spying.
"No! the foremost is our foe—he so long before us flying!
Now he spies us! see him start! wave his kerchief like a banner!
Lay his left hand on his heart in a proud, insulting manner.
Well he knows that distant spot's past our ball, his low scorn flinging.
If you cannot feel the shot, you shall hear the firelock's ringing,
Jack, the Regular!"
Ha! he falls! An ambuscade? 'Twas impossible to strike him!
Are there Tories in the glade? Such a trick is very like him.
See! his comrade by him kneels, turning him in terror over,
Then takes nimbly to his heels. Have they really slain the rover?
It is worth some risk to know; so, with firelocks poised and ready,
Up the sloping hills they go, with a quick lookout and steady.
Dead! The random shot had struck, to the heart had pierced the Tory—
Vengeance seconded by luck! Lies there, cold and stiff and gory,
Jack, the Regular.
"Jack, the Regular, is dead! Honor to the man who slew him!"
So the Bergen farmers said as they crowded round to view him;
For the wretch that lay there slain had with wickedness unbending
To their roofs brought fiery rain, to their kinsfolk woeful ending.
Not a mother but had prest, in a sudden pang of fearing,
Sobbing darlings to her breast when his name had smote her hearing;
Not a wife that did not feel terror when the words were uttered;
Not a man but chilled to steel when the hated sounds he muttered—
Jack, the Regular.
Bloody in his work was he, in his purpose iron-hearted—
Gentle pity could not be when the pitiless had parted.
So, the corse in wagon thrown, with no decent cover o'er it—
Jeers its funeral rites alone—into Hackensack they bore it,
'Mid the clanging of the bells in the old Brick Church's steeple,
And the hooting and the yells of the gladdened, maddened people.
Some they rode and some they ran by the wagon where it rumbled,
Scoffing at the lifeless man, all elate that death had humbled
Jack, the Regular.
Thus within the winter night, when the hickory fire is roaring,
Flickering streams of ruddy light on the folk before it pouring—
When the apples pass around, and the cider follows after,
And the well-worn jest is crowned by the hearers' hearty laughter—
When the cat is purring there, and the dog beside her dozing,
And within his easy-chair sits the grandsire old, reposing,—
Then they tell the story true to the children, hushed and eager,
the two Van Valens slew, on a time, the Tory leaguer,
Jack, the Regular.
THOMAS DUNN ENGLISH.
OBSERVATIONS AND ADVENTURES IN SUBMARINE DIVING
[Greek: —liphon eponumon te reuma kai petraerephae autoktit' antra.]
ÆSCHYLUS: Prometheus Bound.
Did you ever pause before a calm, bright little pool in the woods, and look steadily at the picture it presents, without feeling as if you had peeped into another world? Every outline is preserved, every tint is freshened and purified, in the cool, glimmering reflection. There is a grace and a softness in the prismatic lymph that give a new form and color to the common and familiar objects it has printed in its still, pellucid depths. Every little basin of clear water by the roadside is a magic mirror, and transforms all that it encloses. There is a vastness of depth, too, in that concave hemisphere, through which the vision sinks like a falling star, that excites and fills the imagination. What it shows is only a shadow, but all things seen are mere shadows painted on the retina, and you have, at such times, a realistic sense of the beautiful and bold imagery which calls a favorite fountain of the East the Eye of the Desert.
The alluring softness of this mimic world increases to sublimity when, instead of some rocky basin, dripping with mossy emeralds and coral berries, you look upon the deep crystalline sea. Each mates to its kind. This does not gather its imagery from gray, mossy rock or pendent leaf or flower, but draws into its enfolding arms the wide vault of the cerulean sky. The richness of the majestic azure is deepened by that magnificent marriage. The pale blue is darkened to violet. Far through the ever-varying surface of the curious gelatinous liquid breaks the phosphorescence, sprinkled into innumerable lights and cross-lights. As you look upon those endless pastures thought is quickened with the conception of their innumerable phases of vitality. The floating weed, whose meshes measure the spaces of continents and archipelagoes, is everywhere instinct with animal and vegetable life. The builder coral, glimmering in its softer parts with delicate hues and tints, throws up its stony barrier through a thousand miles of length and a third as much in breadth, fringing the continents with bays and sounds and atoll islands like fairy rings of the sea. Animate flowers—sea-nettles, sea anemones, plumularia, campanularia, hydropores, confervae, oscillatoria, bryozoa—people the great waters. Sea-urchins, star-fish, sea-eggs, combative gymnoti, polypes, struggle and thrive with ever-renewing change of color; gelatinous worms that shine like stars cling to every weed; glimmering animalcules, phosphorescent medusae, the very deep itself is vivid with sparkle and corruscation of electric fire. So through every scale, from the zoophyte to the warm-blooded whale, the sea teems with life, out of which fewer links have been dropped than from sub-aërial life. It is a matter for curious speculation that the missing species belong not to the lower subsidiary genera, as in terrene animals, but to the highest types of marine life. In the quarries of Lyme Regis, among the accumulations of a sea of the Liassic period, lay the huge skeleton of the Ichthyosaurus, a warm-blooded marine existence, with huge saucer eyes of singular telescopic power, that gleamed radiant "with the eyelids of the morning," "by whose neesings alight doth shine"—the true leviathan of Job. In the same extinct sea is found the skeleton of the Plesiosaurus, a marine lizard of equal size, and warm-blooded, whose swan-like neck and body graced the serene seas of the pre-adamite world. Another was that of the Pterodactyl, the antique aragon, a winged fish. The task of sustaining these existences was too great for old Ocean, and the monsters dropped from the upper end of the chain into the encrusting mud, the petrified symbols of failure. So one day man may drop into the limbo of vanities, among the abandoned tools in the Creator's workshop.
But, however high or low the degree in the scale, one distinguishing feature marks the vital creation in vegetable or animal—an intelligence capable of adjusting itself to the elements about it, and electing its food. The sunflower, even, does not follow the sun by a mechanical law, but, growing by a fair, bright sheet of water, looks as constantly at that shining surface for the beloved light as ever did the fabled Greek boy at his own image in the fountain. The tendrils of the vine seek and choose their own support, and the thirsty spongioles of the root find the nourishing veins of water. Growth, says a naturalist, is the conscious motion of vegetable life. But this theory of kinship, imperfect in the plant, becomes plain and distinct in the animate creation. However far removed, the wild dolphin at play and the painted bird in the air are cousins of man, with a responsive chord of sympathy connecting them.
It is this feeling that sends an exhilarating thrill through the submarine explorer when a school of porpoises frisk by with undulating grace, the marine type of a group of frolicking children. It is the instinctive perception that it is a pure enjoyment to the fish, the healthy glow and laugh of submarine existence. But for that sense of sympathetic nature the flying-fish, reeling porpoise and dolphin would be no more to him than the skipping shuttle in a weaver's loom, the dull impetus of senseless machinery. Self-generated motion is the outward and visible sign of vitality—its wanton exercise the symbol and expression of enjoyment. The poor philosopher who distinguished humanity as singular in the exhibition of humor had surely never heard a mocking-bird sing, watched a roguish crow or admired a school of fish.
This keen appreciation of a kindred life in the sea has thrown its charm over the poetry and religion of all races. Ocean us leaves the o'erarching floods and rocky grottoes at the call of bound Prometheus; Cyrene, with her nymphs, sits in the cool Peneus, where comes Aristaeus mourning for his stolen bees; the Druid washed his hedge-hyssop in the sacred water, and priestesses lived on coral reefs visited by remote lovers in their sundown seas; Schiller's diver goes into the purpling deep and sees the Sea-Horror reaching out its hundred arms; the beautiful Undine is the vivid poetry of the sea. Every fountain has its guardian saint or nymph, and to this day not only the German peasant and benighted English boor thrill at the sight of some nymph-guarded well, but the New Mexican Indian offers his rude pottery in propitiation of the animate existence, the deity of the purling spring.
"Der Taucher," for all the rhythm and music that clothes his luckless plunge, was but a caitiff knight to some of our submarine adventurers. A diver during the bay-fight in Mobile harbor had reason to apprehend a more desperate encounter. A huge cuttle-fish, the marine monster of Pliny and Victor Hugo, had been seen in the water. His tough, sinuous, spidery arms, five fathoms long, wavered visibly in the blue transparent gulf,
Und schaudernd dacht ich's—da kroch's heran,
Regte hundert Gelenke zugleich,
Will schnappen nach mir.
A harpoon was driven into the leathery, pulpy body of the monster, but with no other effect than the sudden snapping of the inch line like thread. It was subsequent to this that, as the diver stayed his steps in the unsteady current, his staff was seized below. The water was murky with the river-silt above the salt brine, and he could see nothing, but after an effort the staff was rescued or released. Curious to know what it was, he probed again, and the stick was wrenched from his hand. With a thrill he recognized in such power the monster of the sea, the devil-fish. He returned anxious, doubtful, but resolute. Few like to be driven from a duty by brute force. He armed himself, and descended to renew the hazardous encounter in the gloomy solitude of the sea-bottom. I would I had the wit to describe that tournament beneath the sea; the stab, thrust, curvet, plunge—the conquest and capture of the unknown combatant. A special chance preserves the mediaeval character of the contest, saving it from the sulphurous associations of modern warfare that might be suggested by the name of devil-fish. No: the antagonist wore a coat-of-mail and arms of proof, as became a good knight of the sea, and was besides succulent, digestible—a veritable prize for the conqueror. It was a monstrous crab.
The constant encounter of strange and unforeseen perils enables the professional diver to meet them with the same coolness with which ordinary and familiar dangers are confronted on land. On one occasion a party of such men were driven out into the Gulf by a fierce "norther," were tossed about like chips for three days in the vexed element, scant of food, their compass out of order, and the horizon darkened with prevailing storm. At another time a party wandered out in the shallows of one of the keys that fringe the Gulf coast. They amused themselves with wading into the water, broken into dazzling brilliance. A few sharks were seen occasionally, which gradually and unobserved increased to, a squadron. The waders meanwhile continued their sport until the evening waned away. Far over the dusk violet Night spread her vaporous shadows:
The blinding mist came up and hid the land,
And round and round the land,
And o'er and o'er the land,
As far as eye could see.
At last they turned their steps homeward, crossing the little sandy key, between which and the beach lay a channel shoulder-deep, its translucent waves now glimmering with phosphorescence. But here they were met by an unexpected obstacle. The fleet of sharks, with a strategical cunning worthy of admiration, had flanked the little island, and now in the deeper water formed in ranks and squadrons, and, with their great goggle eyes like port-fires burning, lay ready to dispute the passage. Armed with such weapons as they could clutch, the men dashed into the water with paeans and shouts and the broken pitchers of fallen Jericho. The violet phosphorescence lighted them on their way, and tracked with luminous curve and star every move of the enemy. The gashed water at every stroke of club or swish of tail or fin bled in blue and red fire, as if the very sea was wounded. The enemy's line of battle was broken and scattered, but not until more than one of the assailants had looked point-blank into the angry eyes of a shark and beaten it off with actual blows. It was the Thermopylae of sharkdom, with numbers reversed—a Red Sea passage resonant with psalms of victory.
There are novel difficulties as well as dangers to be encountered. The native courage of the man must be tempered, ground and polished. On land it is the massing of numbers that accomplishes the result—the accumulation of vital forces and intelligence upon the objective point. The innumerable threads of individual enterprise, like the twist of a Manton barrel, give the toughest tensile power. Under the sea, however, it is often the strength of the single thread, the wit of the individual pitted against the solid impregnability of the elements, the vis inertiae of the sea. It looks as if uneducated Nature built her rude fastnesses and rocky battlements with a special I view to resistance, making the fickle and I unstable her strongest barricade. An example of the skill and address necessary to conquer obstacles of the latter kind was illustrated in Mobile Bay. There lay about a sunken vessel an impenetrable mail of quicksand. It became necessary to sink piles into this material. The obstacle does not lie in its fickle, unstable character, but its elastic tension. It swallows a nail or a beam by slow, serpent-like deglutition. It is hungry, insatiable, impenetrable. Try to force it, to drive down a pile by direct force: it resists. The mallet is struck back by reverberating elasticity with an equal force, and the huge pointed stake rebounds. Brute force beats and beats in vain. The fickle sand will not be driven—no, not an inch.
Wit comes in where weight breaks down. A force-pump, a common old-style fire-engine, was rigged up, the nozzle and hose bound to a huge pile,
to equal which the tallest pine
Hewn on Norwegian hills, to be the mast
Of some great ammiral, were but a wand.
The pump was set to work. The water tore through the nostril-pipe, boring a hole with such rapidity that the tall beam dropped into the socket with startling suddenness. Still breathing torrents, the pipe was withdrawn: the clutching sand seized, grappled the stake. It is cemented in.
You may break, you may shatter the stake, if you will,
but—you can never pull it out.
Perhaps the most singular and venturesome exploit ever performed in submarine diving was that of searching the sunken monitor Milwaukee during the bay-fight in Mobile harbor. This sea-going fortress was a huge double-turreted monitor, with a ponderous, crushing projectile force in her. Her battery of four fifteen-inch guns, and the tough, insensible solidity of her huge wrought-iron turrets and heavy plated hulk, burdened the sleepy waters of the bay. Upon a time she braced her iron jacket about her, girded her huge sides with fifteen-inch pistolry, and went rolling her clumsy volume down the bay to mash Fort Taylor to rubbish and débacle. The sea staggered under her ponderous gliding and groaned about her massive bulk as she wended her awkward course toward the bay-shore over against the fort. She sighted her blunderbusses, and, rolling, grunting, wheezing in her revolving towers like a Falstaff ill at ease, spat her gobbets of flame and death. The poor little water-spaniel fort ran down to the shore and barked at her of course. Cui bono or malo? Why, like Job's mates, fill its poor belly with the east wind, or try to draw out leviathan with a hook, or his tongue with a cord thou lettest down? Yet who treads of the fight between invulnerable Achilles and heroic Hector, and admires Achilles? The admiral of the American fleet, sick of the premature pother, signaled the lazy solidity to return. The loathly monster, slowly, like a bull-dog wrenched from his victim, rolled snarling, lazily, leisurely down the bay, not obeying and yet not disobeying the signal.
All along the sunny coast, like flowers springing up in a battle-field, were rows of little white cottages, tenanted by women and children—love, life and peace in the midst of ruin and sudden death. At the offending spectacle of homely peace among its enemies the unglutted monster eased its huge wrath. Tumbling and bursting among the poor little pasteboard shells of cottages, where children played and women gossiped of the war, and prayed for its end, no matter how, fell the huge globes and cones of murder. Shrieks and cries, slain babes and wounded women on shore; surly, half-mutinous officers and crew on that iron hulk, shocked at the fell work they were set to do; and the glimmer and wash of the bay-water below—that sweet, tranquil, half-transparent liquid, with idle weeds and chips upon it, empty crates and boxes of dead merchandise, sacked of their life and substance by the war, as one might swallow an oyster; the soft veils of shadowy ships and the distant city spires; umbrageous fires and slips of shining sand all mirrored in the soft and quiet sea, while this devilish pother went on. There is a buoy adrift! No, it is a sodden cask, perhaps of spoiling meat, while the people in the town yonder are starving; and still the huge iron, gluttonous monster bursts its foam of blood and death, while the surly crew curse and think of mothers and babes at home. Better to look at the bay, the idle, pleasing summer water, with chips and corks and weeds upon it; better to look at the bubbling cask yonder—much better, captain, if you only knew it! But the reluctant, heavy iron turret groans and wheezes on its pivotal round, and it will be a minute or half a minute before the throated hell speaks again. But it will speak: machinery is fatally accurate to time and place. Can nothing stay it, or stop the trembling of those bursting iron spheres among yon pretty print-like homes? No: look at the buoy, wish-wash, rolling lazily, bobbing in the water, a lazy, idle cask, with nothing in the world to do on this day of busy mischief. What hands coopered it in the new West? what farmer filled it? There is the grunting of swine, lowing of cattle, in the look of the staves. But the turret groans and wheezes and goes around, whether you look at it or not. What cottage this time? The soft lap-lap of the water goes on, and the tedious cask gets nearer: it will slide by the counter. You have a curious interest in that. No: it grates under the bow; it—Thunder and wreck and ruin! Has the bay burst open and swallowed us? The huge, invulnerable iron monster—not invulnerable after all—has met its master in the idle cask. It is blind, imprisoned Samson pulling down the pillars of the temple. The tough iron plates at the bow are rent and torn and twisted like wet paper. A terrible hole is gashed in the hull. The monster wobbles, rolls, gasps, and drinks huge gulps of water like a wounded man—desperately wounded, and dying in his thirsty veins and arteries. The swallowed torrent rushes aft, hissing and quenching the fires; beats against the stern, and comes forward with the rush of that repulse to meet the incoming wave. Into the boats, the water—anywhere but here. She reels again and groans; and then, as a desperate hero dies, she slopes her huge warlike beak at the hostile water and rushes to her own ruin with a surge and convulsion. The victorious sea sweeps over it and hides it, laughing at her work. She will keep it safely. That is the unsung epic of the Milwaukee, without which I should have little to say of the submarine diving during the bay-fight.
The harbor of Mobile is shaped like a rude Innuit boot. At the top, Tensaw and Mobile Rivers, in their deltas, make, respectively, two and three looplike bands, like the straps. The toe is Bonsecour Bay, pointing east. The heel rests on Dauphin Island, while the main channel flows into the hollow of the foot between Fort Morgan and Dauphin Island. In the north-west angle, obscured by the foliage, lay the devoted city, suffering no less from artificial famine, made unnecessarily, than the ligatures that stopped the vital current of trade. Tons of meat were found putrefying while the citizens, and even the garrison, had been starving on scanty rations. Food could be purchased, but at exorbitant rates, and the medium of exchange, Confederate notes, all gone to water and waste paper. The true story of the Lost Cause has yet to be written. North of Mobile, in the Trans-Mississippi department, thousands whose every throb was devoted to the enterprise, welcomed the Northern invaders, not as destroyers of a hope already dead by the act of a few entrusted with its defence, but as something better than the anarchy that was not Southern independence or anything else human.
